Burning Farms

'B' is for Burning.

This one is not one I wished for! I would rather not have a 'B' blip for today!

We went to Future Ed, the annual Education Show, in the Coca Cola Dome in Johannesburg this morning, R jr phoned us there, in quite a state of panic, telling us that his sweet little A phoned him to contact us for help from the neighbourhood watch, their farm is on fire!! This is what we could see when we approached Harties from Broederstroom side on our return from Johannesburg, we could, in fact, see that smoke cloud from Johannesburg, and we were wondering whether it could really be 'their fire' we saw when we left the Coca Cola Dome!

C phoned the Co-ordinator of our local Neighbourhood Watch, he contacted the Fire Brigade at Necsa but they were all out extinguishing a huge fire at the local Luxury Amazingwe Lodge, so we had to contact the Fire Brigade in Pretoria. No luck there either.

In the meantime A, her mom and her brother tried whatever they could to stay safe, their whole house was surrounded by fire, the mom succeeded in moving her car to safety just in time, just after she moved it to the front lawn, the fire swept through the car ports where they usually park their cars. A's dad is on the plane, en route back from Malaysia where he worked the past 2 weeks.

Fortunately their house did not catch fire but there are no plants or grass left on their farm, and the fire blazed on in the direction of the houses of neighbouring farms. The whole community got involved in helping to fight the fire, our dear A and family are so traumatised and suffer from smoke inhalation and of course, exhaustion!