You and your wife seem like wonderful people. My questions are: have you lived in South Africa your whole life? What's it like? Which important life experiences shaped you into person you are today?

Thank you…I’ll definitely pass on the compliment. 🙂

I’ve lived in SA my entire life, with two short stints living abroad as well. I spent a year in Saudi and 6 months in Tunisia. South Africa is often under estimated, over simplified, and grossly misunderstood. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time. We spend an insane amount of money on personal safety, but still have a generally good quality of life. Personal freedoms are usually respected, including religious, political and philosophical differences.

I guess the most prominent life experiences that come to mind would include my extremely dysfunctional relationship with my father. It forced me to be independently minded, and made me realise that horrible labels and condescending names didn’t define who I am. So I was forced to realise at an early age that my life was up to me to shape, because I never received any hand-ups or hand outs from him or anyone else. 

The death of my first wife was a turning point for me as well. It forced me to look at life differently, and for the first time, despite my isolated childhood, I realised exactly how alone we are in this world, and how temporary everything is. 

There’s a number of other incidents that have left some beautiful scars in my life, but they’re too numerous to mention here. I generally shy away from talking too much about the challenges I’ve faced because it generally solicits the same response from people which is this glazed disbelieving look of ‘yeah right’. But I’m not one to overly embellish a life experience in search of sympathy, so that’s why I prefer to share just selected details about my life experiences because most people think I’ve just got an over active imagination in my search for attention.