Still waiting

I' m still waiting for a letter someone send me last year may. It contains some pictures so I was quite eager to receive it, but I decided to give it up after two months of waiting. That's a reasonable period right? Or am I being very hard on the South African postal services?
On feb. 12th of this year I posted two letters to Amsterdam, the Netherlands. One arrived ten days later as planned, the other arrived two months (!) later.
A month later I found out that sending a card from Cape Town to Jo'burg takes as long as sending it to Holland (when it arrives according schedule that is).
I realise I am spoiled by the postal system in Holland. When you post something there it arrives according to plan and you don't have to send anything via registered mail, the regular service is reliable enough. Here everybody is very quick to ask "do you have a tracking number?" the minute I start complaining about missing letters. No, I don't. Isn't the postal service obliged to deliver ALL the post safe?

One last comment about post: our house doesn't have a post box. I so take that for granted that only when was I about to receive mail I noticed that wasn't even possible, because of a lack of space for the postmen to throw it in. Turns out that because of the security complexes lots of people live in (and the gates that go with those) hardly anyone has a post box attached to the house. They all rent a p.o. box. Ours is 500 metre down the street where we live in. And don't ask me how people in some townships receive their mail. The stone houses can receive mail, but what about the people who live in self-made shacks? Do they ever receive mail?

(Some of the things that did arrive)