Canadiana Backpackers Blog

Evert is our longest residing “Saffa” (South African) at our Hostel. He has been in Toronto for a little over a year and has spent the entire time with us.

He has stayed in a lot of hostels since he left South Africa to work abroad more than four years ago and has always lived in hostels as a matter of convenience.

Travelers normally come here with a one-year “working holiday” visa” and can sometimes extend for an additional year.

Evert’s situation is a little different. His mother happened to have been born in Ottawa and because of that fact, he is also a Canadian citizen.

Evert doesn’t drink, smoke and carry on irresponsibly as do many of his contemporaries. He is, in fact, a workaholic in the truest sense of he word. For the better part of 11 months he worked two jobs and got by on about three or four hours sleep a night.

It was only after a doctor forced him to give up his night job to deal with headaches he was experiencing.

It was testament to his work ethic that both his day and night jobs offered him promotions at the same time with accompanying salary increases.

Evert reluctantly gave up his night job which saw him working sometimes until four in the morning and his day job starts at eight thirty a.m.! The lack of sleep did not effect his work – only his health!

Evert’s knowledge of hostels, desire to work and obvious work ethnic caused us to hire him to work a few evenings a week at our front office reception. The shifts he does end at two a.m. giving him about 6 hours sleep on those evenings.

That as it turns out is plenty for Evert!

Evert (2d from the right) not drinking at a local pubs with friends who do!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.