Feel It? It's Here!

"Feel it! It’s here!” is the tagline for the South African World Cup experience. You see and hear it everywhere. It’s another way of saying, "Show, don't tell." 

From the moment visitors to South Africa land at our crowded airports, they feel FIFA FEVA! I wish you could all experience this for yourselves. So I thought I would take you all on a brief trip to a World Cup match in my home town of Port Elizabeth (PE).

As we leave the airport, cars whizz by flying national flags. We drive along newly widened roads. Flags flutter from fences, hang in windows of houses and buildings and festoon the front of shops and hotels. I park the car near the beach and we get out to walk.

The heavily-guarded four and five-star hotels which cater for the teams when they’re in PE, overlook the sea. So the beach front, shopping centre, and pavements (sidewalks) are abuzz with foreigners and locals, mostly arrayed in festive outfits and national colours.

The day of your visit is the day the Portuguese team play Ivory Coast, and both these nations are colourful in appearance and behaviour. Everyone we pass greets us with big smiles, laughs, cheers, and friendly comments.

You especially notice the friendliness of the people clad in the green and gold of South Africa as they wish you and other visitors "Good luck!". They are showing you "Ubuntu" - the African philosophy that we are all inter-related, and cannot live without one another.

Someone near you yells, "Ayoba!" and several shout back. This slang term expresses excitement and delight. Before the World Cup, this referred to good dancing, but it’s obviously become a soccer byword.  You jump as a taxi zooms past. A passenger leans from the window blowing a raucous plastic trumpet. It's the infamous vuvuzela. The constant buzzing of hornets you heard on your TV back home is nothing like the real thing. To your surprise, you notice many of the foreigners carry vuvuzelas.

Up ahead, you recognise the familiar smell of KFC. Along the beach front, vendors tout traditional South African food. It’s been a long time since breakfast. You eye a "curry bunny", relieved to see that it's actually curried mince that oozes from a vetkoek, a South African version of the old fashioned Dutch olliebollen. You trace a pungent smoky smell to what looks like beef sausage (which you learn is boerewors, a spicy traditional sausage) sizzling on an open barbecue (or braai as it’s called here.)

You can’t resist the smells any more. You pull money from your pocket and try to figure out how many rands and cents you need and how it translates into your money back home. The vendor spoons a cooked tomato and onion sauce over the wors, and you're ready to go.

We join a long queue of excited people of all colours and nationalities to buy our tickets for the Park-and-Ride. Half-an-hour later, we climb onto the shuttle with concertina-like joined coaches. From the excitement of the locals you realise these are new acquisitions to the city, especially bought for the World Cup.

The chatter, the laughter, the sharing of experiences, and yes, even the odd vuvuzela, makes this the most exciting, and noisiest, bus trip you have ever experienced. A loud cheer goes up, accompanied by more blasts of several vuvu-you-know-whats, as a bus bearing one of the teams drives past with a police escort, sirens wailing.

After a 15-minute bus ride, and a 20-minute walk along with thousands of others, we finally enter the stadium. Heavily armed police dressed in riot-garb stand at every entrance, guns to the ready. No one seems worried, so you decide not to be either.

Security is very high throughout the country, as South Africa is determined to ensure the safety of all its guests. Inside the stadium, a massive ring of security guards, dressed in orange, stand with their backs to the field, their eyes fixed on the spectators. They are not permitted to even glance at the game at any point. Remembering some of the disastrous moments in world sport, you feel relief. Here, in a country reputed to be high in crime and violence, you feel safe.

The beautiful world-class new stadium is packed. Before long, a roar from the crowd welcomes the teams as they jog onto the field.

They stand to attention in front of their flags. Silence—a blessed vuvuzela-free silence—falls across the stadium as the national anthems of the two teams blaze out from the gigantic speakers. Any person playing the vuvuzela during a national anthem will be immediately removed from the stadium and heavily fined.

You insert your earplugs as deep as possible.They don't block out the sound of the vuvuzelas, but they muffle it and protect your hearing. At one point you remove one to say something to me, then jolt in alarm at the explosion of sound which hits your eardrum. You hastily push it back into position, and soon master the art of shouting into my also-plugged ear.

The combined noise of the vuvuzelas is deafening—literally. The decibel level is such that spectators have been repeatedly warned through the media to wear good ear plugs to protect their hearing. But it is also magical. It is thrilling. And it is African. The African World Cup experience wouldn't be the same without vuvuzelas. At least there is no litter. No bottle-throwing. No unruly spectators. Despite the huge excited crowd of over 40,000 people, you don't feel threatened.

"La-doooooo-mah!" screams the crowd. The Portuguese thought they had scored a goal. A loud groan goes up at the realisation that the kicker was offside, and the goal doesn't count. You've learned another African word. "Laduma" is the word of celebration when a goal is scored.

A Mexican wave starts at the far side of the stadium and does three circuits of the entire crowd before petering out. At half-time, Zakumi, the S.A. World Cup mascot, walks along the bottom of the stands, waving and blowing kisses. People shout and wave back.

At the end of the game we join the masses as they return to the shuttles. No matter who's won or lost, everyone seems happy. An accidental shove, a hand reaching out to stop you falling, laughter, numb behinds from sitting too long, and oh yes—still the occasional vuvuzela. It’s all part of FIFA FEVA.

Ayoba! Feel it? It’s here!

Have you attended a function where all the senses were in abundance? Please tell us.
(For some great of photos of the "about town" excitement, see Ruth’s post a few days ago.)

SHIRLEY M. CORDER is an RN, a pastor’s wife, mother, grandmother and multi-published freelance writer. You can contact Shirley through her website or follow her on Twitter.

Mixed Emotions

In less than 50 days, South Africa will be the first African nation to host the FIFA World Cup in Soccer (Football). Many of the matches are already booked to capacity. The stadiums will be full of screaming, cheering fans. Because it's South Africa, there will be thousands of vuvuzelas bellowing out to add to the cacophony. 

(A vuvuzela is a plastic trumpet-like instrument, about a meter long that South African fans blow at soccer games.)
These spectators won't be sitting quietly watching the match, they'll be going wild. They're not scared to express their emotions.

Recently, the Mighty Men conference hosted 300,000 men to a week-end long rally on a farm in KwaZulu Natal. The men travelled from all over South Africa.


They stayed in their own tents, miles from the "preaching area". This photo shows them during a time of worship. (Photo taken from the middle of the crowd! There were just as many behind.) They clearly weren't scared of emotions.  

On Friday, Daniella spoke of how our emotions can influence our writing. Then on Saturday, Harry spoke of the need to reign in our lives and not be ruled by outside circumstances or emotions. Today, I want to take this unintentional theme one step further.

How does what we read or write influence our emotions? Both gave me problems this past week.

As a reader: The other night, I couldn't get to sleep because I'd been reading Face, by Angela Hunt. (Excellent read by the way.) I eventually knew I had to get to sleep, so put the book down at the end of a chapter. Stupidly, it was also the middle of a scary part of the story. Eventually, I had to get up, heat myself some milk, put on a flashlight and climb under the blankets. (No, I wasn’t hiding so my mother didn’t find me reading. I was trying not to wake my husband.) After I read past that section, I could get to sleep. I had been so caught up in the emotions created by the story, my mind couldn't switch off.

As a writer: For several days, I struggled with a section of a non-fiction chapter due to go to an agent. My critique partners had returned the chapter with comments such as, "This is terrifying. I wouldn't read it if it applied to me." Yet there was a lesson for the reader further on in the chapter, if they ever managed to reach it. If I took the section out, there would be no point in the rest of the chapter. But did I want to create negative emotions in someone who was already battling with health issues? My own emotions went in a spin. Should I water the story down? Or do I owe it to my reader to tell the truth?

We all know about the mind/body connection. It is medically recognized that emotions affect our health. Too much stress leads to high blood pressure and ulcers.

Since childhood, I have absorbed emotions from stories. Whether I read the story, or watch it on film, I become engrossed in the lives of the characters. Romantic films make me warm towards my husband. Films with an unhappy twist leave me disgruntled and wishing I hadn't wasted the time watching them. Thrillers have me sitting up wide-eyed at night, drinking warm milk and wishing I'd had more self-control. 

Often when I do manage to fall asleep after reading a gripping story, I continue to live the story in my dreams. Why, even Harry Potter had me doing battle on broomsticks. Stories where the hero/heroine is encouraging, like Finding Forrester, leave me wanting to do something grand and leave a mark on the world.

Many people, with stronger constitutions than I have, love thrillers, the more gory the better. Their hearts pound and their mouths turn dry as they leaf through the pages as fast as their eyes can take in the words. When they finish the book, they'll say, "What a wonderful read." Yet if the same events happened in their lives, they'd describe it as "the worst time of my life." What’s the difference? It’s simple. We can put the book down. We can make ourselves a cup of coffee during the advertisements. We can control the strength of our emotion.

For a fulfilling life, we need to experience the full range of emotions. If we never experienced fear, how would we recognize calm? If we didn’t ever get angry, we wouldn’t learn control. The key is to keep moving on. As a reader, we trust the writer to give us calm periods where we can catch our breath (or go to sleep!) Even Paul warned us, “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry.” (Ephesians 4:26 NIV)

As a reader, I need to choose my books so that they will create positive emotions for me, especially at bedtime. When I'm awake, I can take deliberate steps to overcome negative feelings. But when my mind slips out of gear and into Slumberland, I lose that control. So if I want to be healthy and happy, I need to be selective of what I read and when.

How about us as writers? Are there ways we can influence our readers to think clearer, live better, be healthier? Surely as Christian writers, we have an exciting responsibility to help our readers experience emotions—the full range of emotions. Let’s excite them, scare them, bring tears to their eyes. But let’s be sure we leave them with emotions that will make them want to come back. Let’s give them emotions that will leave them better people. It's a powerful challenge.

Jonatan Mårtensson said: "Feelings are much like waves, we can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.” He has a point. I need to avoid the thriller type waves, especially at night. But what sort of waves should I look for? 

As writers, we need to weave in the happy emotions as well as the negative. We want to increase our readers’ heart rates and metabolism. But we want to leave them feeling good about themselves. And as readers, we need to choose which waves we will surf. Especially last thing at night.

What about you? Have you ever read a book that affected your actions in a positive or negative way? Tell us about it.

SHIRLEY M. CORDER can be contacted through her website or you can follow her on Twitter.