The third of March lit up the rooms of Eendrag again! With the many arrivals, newcomers were hurried in corridors by house committee members who just could not be even a little slower. ‘Time is of an essence Mr Mudzielwana’ I was told as I struggled and only saw the man accelerating exuberantly five-ten steps ahead, leading me to my room.
From then, it could be told seven am became the routine. We would file up in threes and listen to the wise Mr Nair and Mr Combrink tell us what’s next on our schedule. By 13h00 we would be in the Eetsaal, regardless of whatever we had been doing before then. We would follow those routines every day, with dinner at 18:00. Somehow there was always someone who messed around with the rules of the Eetsaal and wore a hat in the dining-hall. This behavior would be answered by a racketing of spoons,forks and knives on tables which often would result in a creation of a bit that Mr Derman would later emulate during the practice of the ‘Groet ’ song.
Sassy memories there, by the tennis courts, where we greeted plenty of girls’ residences as a united Eendrag newcomers team after having been kept busy every blink for about a week. To think about it, a week. That is all we needed to grow within each other. The leadership of Eendrag was committed in defying the quote ‘if you wanna go fast, go alone – if you wanna go far, go together’ because we seemed to be going fast and further, but united. It was those long walks to and from Stellenbosch central which gave us time to talk, which not only baptized us in sweat but also in the spirit to live for one another and never leave an Eendragter behind.
We tested our brotherly bond when we all similarly failed to have a proper cut of an eagle. We fell together! We demonstrated that we work together, when finally we passed our eagle test with almost identical eagles.
The 2021 welcoming event was conspicuously a very peculiar event which required a different approach. COVID-19, which was in full swing just a month before the event started, required that we follow regulations like social distancing and sanitising. However, with genius planning, welcoming didn’t fall short of being a shockingly beautiful experience. It produced so many ‘aha, that’s so cool’ moments, and maybe we wouldn’t want to be first years again for another welcoming, doing 20000 steps in sweaty “dagdrag” just to get ice cream in town – which was a practice of discipline. However, the newcomers of 2021 declare the welcoming experience as one of the most spectacular events to be entirely designed for them.
