In summary:

• Part 1 began with my present life as an English teacher in South Korea—a most unlikely outcome given the circumstances that preceded it. Before arriving in Korea, my mother, our pets, and I had endured the collapse of our family business, the abandonment of the person who had been our primary provider, and the homelessness that followed.
  
• At one point, we found ourselves living and working on a remote animal shelter farm in South Africa, where we exchanged manual labor for food and shelter. It was a far cry from the life I had once known as a university student and PhD candidate.
  
• Part 2 continues the story by returning to those difficult days and weeks, tracing the events that unfolded as we lost our home, searched desperately for somewhere to stay, and tried to find a way forward.

These dislocations came at a profound personal cost. I lost not only the woman whom I had long believed would one day become my wife, but also many of my closest friends. The life, relationships, and future I had once imagined for myself seemed to unravel alongside everything else.

The emotional and physical toll of these events upon my body was immense. For most of my adult life, my weight had remained in the low nineties, but over the course of those tumultuous months I lost more than twenty kilograms, falling to just 67 kilograms. I weighed scarcely more than I had as a fourteen-year-old boy!

Hopeless and destitute, and desperate to protect my mother and Lilly, I swallowed my pride and began turning to others for help. For the most part, we were ignored. When you have lost everything and have nowhere in the world left to go, where do you turn? I turned to churches. I went back to the churches of my childhood, to the church across the street, to the magnificent cathedral in the center of Swellendam, and to others besides. Yet the doors remained closed. We were turned away.

So I reached out to acquaintances and friends. Two or three, out of kindness and mercy, offered small financial contributions. With what they gave us, I purchased canned food from a small backyard shop in the farming town where we had been staying.

And for those who are willing to help, there are limits to what even kindness can provide. Real limits. When we lost our rented accommodation, we were left with nothing but an old, worn-out car. Everything else we owned—our furniture, appliances, and household possessions—had been auctioned off. My mother and I were left sitting on the side of the road in that car, surrounded by our clothes and our dogs. There were five dogs then. Only Lilly remains today.

Two of the younger dogs were eventually rehomed, but in what remains one of the darkest days of my life, I was forced to surrender the other three to separate animal welfare agencies. They were later euthanized. I had tried everything I could to keep them with us through our homelessness, but eventually there was nowhere left for them to go and nothing more I could do.

Sam

Around that time, an old friend who had remained in contact with me over the years learned of our situation. She calls herself my “spiritual mother”—I will call her Sam—and, when we had nowhere else to turn, she opened her home to us.

I first met Sam, a senior nurse, when I was in my early twenties, during a period when I was struggling with a major depression. Despite the years that had passed, she had never forgotten me. When she learned of our circumstances, she showed us great kindness and allowed my mother, Lilly, and me to stay with her in a lower-income area of Cape Town, where we were the only white people in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, after only a few days, her spouse could no longer tolerate our presence in the home and in a fit demanded that we leave. Once again, we found ourselves back in the car, sitting on the side of the road with nowhere to go. With no other options available, we reached out to an estranged member of our extended family, hoping he might offer us somewhere to turn. Instead, we were met with hostility and rejection.

Sally

But help can also come from the most unexpected places. An old teacher–I will call her Sally– from my junior school years had remained in occasional contact with my mother through Facebook over the years. When she learned that we had been forced to leave Sam’s home, she reached out and offered us a place to stay. Her kindness came at a moment when we had very few options, and once again, help arrived from a place I could never have anticipated.

Sally lived alone with her mother in a large home in one of the most affluent areas of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. She opened her home to us, and we stayed with her for three months before she sold the property and moved into a retirement village.

Those three months became our temporary refuge and, for me, a base of operations. I used every day I had to try to find a way forward. I applied for every job I could, sending out applications wherever I thought there might be even the slightest possibility of employment. At the same time, I began visiting nearby homeless shelters, quietly preparing myself for the possibility that my mother, Lilly, and I would soon be back on the streets.

To my surprise, one of my many job applications finally received a positive response. I was offered a position with an established book chain, and for the first time in a while, it seemed as though a door might finally be opening. I attended the interview and completed the necessary paperwork.

However, there was one complication. An ex-girlfriend of mine had previously worked at the very bookstore where they intended to place me. I had naturally omitted this from both the interview and the application questionnaire, as I had not considered it relevant. When the company discovered the connection, they ultimately withdrew the offer. Once again, I found myself back at square one.

Our time with Sally eventually drew to a close. By then, my mother had found a small, inexpensive—but badly run-down—place to stay in a rural town roughly two hours from Cape Town. The problem was that we had no money left. The only funds available to us were tied up in this blog’s revenue account, money that had accumulated in small amounts over the ten or so years I had been running the blog.

I could not access the funds through my ordinary bank account. However, the money could be withdrawn through a service offered by a particular bank. So, in the week before we were due to leave Sally’s home, I went to that bank and opened an account that would allow me to access the money. To my surprise, it worked.

It was not much, but it was enough. That small reserve, accumulated over roughly a decade of running this blog, gave us just enough to rent a one-bedroomed place in the village for a few months. For the time being, at least, we had somewhere to go. And once again, we packed our bags and set out, this time beginning the journey north from Cape Town.

[To be continued; Part 3 forthcoming]