Not Your Average Technician
A TV technician came by the house this morning to do some work and his accent jumpstarted an interesting conversation. I asked him where he was from and he said, “Columbia” and then laughed.
“How about before that? Ireland?”
“Further south in the hemisphere.”
“South Africa?”
“You got it.”
He went on to describe an interesting life. He was born in 1969 and his family moved from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to South Africa in 1973. Later, as an adult, he worked as a commercial diver mining diamonds in various places along the eastern coast of Africa until he contracted cerebral malaria. For two years he was hospitalized, almost dying on three separate occasions. After getting better, he decided to spend some time traveling the world and he moved to Israel where he made clay pots as a craftsman. When things got more dicey in the Middle East (“I decided it was their war, not mine. I mean, I’m not Jewish. I learned the language and became fluent but I had already had enough of that already.” He then took a job in Santa Cruz, California where he worked at a home for developmentally disabled adults. It was there he met and married a girl who was on assignment for AmeriCorps. (“Our live-in situation meant that we were were working 7 1/2 days a week and 50 hours a day, which meant there was never any privacy.”
He and his bride and their young son decided a change was in order, so they moved to the Midwest so his wife could go to med school.
I asked him if he would still be a commercial diver had he not contracted malaria.
“No, I’d be retired by now, like all my buddies but I had to empty my banking account to pay two years of hospital bills. I went back to South Africa in 2005 and closed off that part of my life. I sold my house and my toys and my Land Rover.”
He described the diamond trade and how they had trained guerilla fighters who provided security for them when they brought up the diamonds from the water. They would begin at 6 am and often, their work wasn’t done until 1 am the following day. They would sort the gravel for karats and what they found would be sold in the UK or in Israel “rather than to the de Beers who were control freaks”.
