Before we sleep, we light a candle.
Tomorrow is the 30th June 2026. Many of you still feel July 2021 in your bodies, the smoke, the barricades, the looting, the fires, the gunshots, the rumours that your area was next. Particularly KZN didn’t sleep that week…
We watched it burn from here in Ireland, and watched this group swell by the thousands in a few short days, with people who just wanted out.
That fear is real.
There is no certainty to give, only that the police and the army are on standby across the country, and both the government and the protest organisers have said they want tomorrow to be peaceful.
That is something. Hold onto it.
All faiths. All colours. All twelve languages. One heartbeat.
Take a moment of silent reflection with us. However you do that. Just pause… and send it out, that all will be calm.
A candle for our home country
Our beloved South Africa, the place that made us before it let us go… our home with thunderstorms and wildness, sunsets that bleed gold over red earth, a land as fierce and as tender as the people it birthed.
Our Mother is crying once again.
For the ones still there and the ones who are leaving, a prayer that the streets stay open and the shelves stay full, for neighbours who choose to look out for each other, the spirit of ubuntu, that same wooden strength Mothers carry balanced on their heads… through the long grass, steady, back straight, eyes forward…
We know this strength. We all carry it.
We who are foreigners in a foreign land know what it is to be looked at sideways, to start again somewhere new with nothing but courage and a bag, to build a life from scratch in a place that doesn’t yet know your name, to lie awake wondering if you’ll ever feel like you belong anywhere again.
An ounce of respect and a mountain of patience, legal or illegal, documented or not.
Because every single one of us was someone’s stranger once…
Our prayer is that the leaving is done with gentleness, that no Mother has to explain to her children why they’re running, that no child sees pain or blood.
Let tomorrow be ordinary. Let it be quiet.
Let everyone come home safe at the end of the day.
Wherever you are tonight, you are not alone in this.
However far we are from home, we’re holding this together. Check in on your family tomorrow. Check in on each other here too.
With much love… Sa2Eire Admin Team 🇿🇦
