Fear. Thats the shadow many South Africans live in everyday. So many brutal killings and rapes, then there are muggings and hijackings. I’ve been mugged twice in a span of a month, it was traumatizing because after that I was too scared to walk out of the house. It gets better though with time and you can share your stories with other victims.

I recently moved to Joburg, and we all know how notorious it can be. I’m from a small Town in Mpumalanga where the crime rate isn’t as high and I still don’t feel afraid walking around at midnight after a night out. Johannesburg on the other hand is daunting, I’m afraid even at 2pm to walk out alone, not that I don’t do it but I’m constantly checking out the person behind me, I refuse to wear anything sexy or revealing...anything that would attract unwanted attention.

I walk really fast, and I try avoid any eye contact, everything is fast, shopping is in and out, I don’t doodle. I’m starting to feel the effects though, the tension is building up and I wake up at every sound even when I’m locked in my bedroom with the alarm system-pepper spray thing on.
I don’t know how long people can carry on like this, we cannot keep living in fear, but I cannot come up with a solution.

It’s unnerving how many posters and signs, pamphlets and flyers are scattered across the country on light poles, walls,handed out to you in the traffic.

I for one am comfortable with the concept that a woman can decide If she wants to have a baby or not, however I can’t believe the government would so carelessly allow for people to advertise so freely, especially when 12 year olds are allowed to use these services freely and to their own discretion here in South Africa.

Prices range from R200 rand to the early thousands, I can’t help but wonder how the conditions are in the really cheap places, how safe these places are. Is there some sort of bar or standard set by the Health department to ensure that the practices are safe.

With so many people promising safe abortions to a generation that is shrouded by teengae pregnancy and HIV, I wonder how much this helps lessen carelessness and promote Safe sex.

Commercialising such a practice is one step towards desensitising people. Nobody thikns of it as the destruction of a human being

There are claims of poor sanitary conditions, and lack of supplies, in addition nights are getting colder and one can imagine how the displaced experience them in their tents.

The aftermath of the first few outbreaks are still being dealt with now in terms of burying the deceased, and the special courts being set up to deal with the perpetrators. On Sunday the 1st of June it was estimated that about 530 people had been arrested, and held in custody. Sadly enough though corruption will always be part of South Africa’s officials, it is claimed that certain volunteers and senior officials were stealing food and clothes that had been donated to the refugees. One refugee was quoted as saying “we eat soup everyday while officials are eating the meat and taking it home”, however the municipality in the Ekhuruleni area allegedly dealing with the claims.

One really saddening story is the one of a man named Sipho Madondo who was shot dead because he wouldn’t take part in the xenophobic attacks, a mob arrived at his house shouting for Sipho to release the foreigners and when he went out and told them he did not want to take part in the attacks he was shot 3 times. It reminds me of the biblical story where 2 strangers arrive at a mans house and ask for shelter, a mob arrives at the house after seeing these foreigners and demand that they be brought out, in the biblical story however the strangers turn out to be angels who then assist their host. Sipho’s wife, who was obviously very angry, said “Sipho died in my arms. He died like a dog, a helpless dog.”. Sipho had no angels that night, he deserves to be with them though if such really do exist.

The PetroSA spokesperson was quoted saying “It is very disturbing that in 2008 a higher learning institution such as Univen has never had a computer laboratory…” I cannot begin to try and imagine how difficult it is for students and lecturers there. Unless they have a very good library the search for information must have been laborious and slow, perhaps a majority of assignments were handwritten which is a bit of a disadvantage for both the lecturer and student where illegible handwriting is concerned. Also upon entering the work place a Univen graduate must have had to undergo computer training of some sort.

Paging backwards through the same paper to page 2, 62 000 Teachers needed, was the headline screaming at me in large bold letters. So many problems in the education department- the skills shortage, under or inappropriately qualified teachers, the slow filling of teaching posts even when candidates are available, many people leaving the teaching profession and hiring foreign teachers has become a problem because of Xenophobic attacks.

Then you hear of the poor quality of schools; a week ago a relative of mine, a 13 year old girl who attends a school in Thulamahashe (Mpumalanga province), was telling me that she didn’t want to go to school because all their chairs had been taken and given to the matrics (Standard 10s) who are currently writing supplementary exams. As she went on telling me some anecdote about one of her classmates, she mentioned how the friend had been leaning against a window and it broke, she was laughing as she spoke because there are many broken windows at her school and to her it was normal, she found her friends expression very funny though.

Its all good and well to have a single belief whatever it may be, but when there is an emulsion of different and more importantly conflicting beliefs it causes a lot of confusion within the individual and this is how you end up with a community of judgmental yet hypocritical, confused yet adamant in their beliefs, angry or very passive, apathetic people.

In light of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, I started asking myself how many of these attackers go to church on Sunday? How many pray to a God but at the same time go out and hurt their brothers and sisters? One finds in the same note that the attackers are afraid of foreigners because they believe they practice witchcraft, they are dangerous and have mysterious ways and stories about them such as Indians have worms inside of them that they transfer during sexual intercourse, Zimbabweans in South Africa are actually ghosts and if you return to their homes in their country you will find that they passed on a long time ago and the fact that many of our neighbours come into the country and go into the business of traditional healing or witch-craft doesn’t help the situation.

Seems like we are burying more and more people in our society, and we hold the funeral services in churches before going to our local cemetery to bury them. The whole event is a mixture of different practice and beliefs such as people in the family aren’t allowed to have sex for 2 weeks or so during and after the funeral period. The widow or widower has to dress in a certain way , or shave their head in some cultures as they mourn, and the mourning period lasts months. If the procedure isn’t followed, many people believe the result is death, some even believe HIV and AIDS are a manifestation of what happens when proper procedure isn’t followed. I cannot count the number of instances where people speculated that the deceased was killed by so and so using witchcraft and that if he or she had paid more attention to their ancestors they might have been protected.

I heard a case of a mother whose son was arrested falsely for theft. While he was in jail, his mother consulted her mother in law who is a witch-doctor who told her that her son would be released and she shouldn’t worry. Before the arrest however the mother went to her church for prayer and assistance. At the same time she firmly believes that her sons ancestors are looking out for him and that’s why he eventually got out. If the son hadn’t been released then the mother would accept that as the will of all the forces in her life, a kind of apathy is it not?

Today at 11:21am
Reply In light of the recent xenophobic attacks I thought it would be a wonderful idea to spend some time with displaced refugee children and understand the circumstances that surround them.

They are part of a programme called project suitcase.

We will meeting, as part of the forgood network, at Observatory Girls School, 2 Delarey Street, Observatory, Johannesburg at 10am, this Saturday 24th May, and will be able to play with and talk to the kids for 1 hour before they go into their counseling session.

There will be a photographer and media person there to write a story which will be distributed to the various regional and local newspapers. This story will aim to inspire other groups of people to take action and show compassion in light of the recent attacks.

Anybody interested please send me a message... God Bless.

www.forgood.co.za

From controlling dictators to people attacking others while they are down. Africa is sick, and it seems to be getting worse. To some extent I’d like to blame globalisation and this notion of the individual. It’s a simple concept for Europeans and the Americas because they founded the idea, they lived it long before Africans even thought of the self as more important than the individual.

Now it’s backfiring, greed is taking over. Everybody wants to take care of their own interests and wants to grab as much as possible that is why it’s a common trend for a young black South African who has just started working to buy a flashy car, it’s a status symbol. That person would rather live on water in a flat sharing 2 rooms, with 5 other people whilst paying car bills for the next few years just so his peers can think he’s got it all or is at least getting there.

Immigrants work for far less than the locals, and so let them work. I still don’t understand the concept of I’d rather not work than work for R400 a month. If you have nothing, don’t you try and get something? Besides somebody has to do the work and Thank you globalisation because the world is a global village now....we are one?

I wonder how African leaders were planning on working their “United States of Africa” idea, clearly we cannot get along. Clearly lots of South Africans who don’t want to work for R400 a month won’t be happy when the flood gates open.

I am a woman who doesn’t really want kids, ever. I think I was born without the maternal gene and so even though I think kids are cute and funny, they are really much smarter than adults, I would rather live on a volcano that have kids.

My predicament arose when I decided to go onto the pill, I got up early one morning to go to the local clinic and get help. Who knew that when you get to the clinic you have to take a number? Who knew that if you actually wanted to get help you’d have to take a number around 5 am.

I arrived at 9 am that morning, got my number at the gate and walked into an inferno. It was hot, stuffy...it was loud, babies were wailing, grannies moaning, people arguing about numbers and I couldn’t tell which queue was going where. Luckily I met somebody I knew who explained that I had to stand in one queue to get my BP and weight taken then get into the next for assistance.

At 1 pm I was in the second queue, when a woman arrived claiming she was in front of me. I hadn’t seen her the whole morning but she said she came to take a number early in the morning and went back home. She estimated that it would be her turn right about now and insisted that I should let her go in before me. NO. If I had let her in, then I’d have to let whoever else came along in, NO. Not after hours and hours of sitting. YES...when she started to tell me about her vomiting and aching side I let her in considering I was there just to pick up pills.

3:30 pm I got hungry, thought of going to get a snack but if I left who knows maybe the queue would move quicker while I was away.

4 pm I went home. No pills. I grabbed a pack of free condoms on the way out, condoms I know will break, then I’ll have to cough up a painful R53 for the morning after pill.

Considering that most people who go to public clinics are the poor and unemployed it’s understandable why the clinics are so full, but it’s not fair that a person who can barely feed herself must now gather the strength to go to a clinic almost daily, hoping that maybe that day they will be helped. If they going to advocate safe sex and responsibility to girls, then they should also be able to provide responsibly. Especially for women who have nothing, at least they should have choices.

Petrol prices are going up at midnight tonight and with it so do the prices of everything else It’s a process, but there are people like Tiger Brands who cash in on these hikes. Considering that Tiger Brands was fined for fixing the price of bread last year, one question, were we all compensated? Did the price go down? ok two questions then.

Anyway my suggestion is that somebody should get rid of all branded bread, that it the Albany, Blue ribbons and Saskos. Branded bread is misleading, I don’t know when last i walked into a bakery and bought bakery baked bread at the supermarket.Many people, even the almost impoverished opt to buy the pre-sliced nicely packaged bread from the local spaza shop. Ok maybe bakery bread does come across as a bit dodgy cause one feels one doesn’t know whats in there but if regulated properly there could be an effort made to bake quality bread, at low prices for everybody and I’m sure they could slice it as well.

When we reach a point where we buy bread for almost 10 Rand a loaf, even when the option of buying it at 4.90Rand is available then we know there is a problem. We all want nice things but they don’t need to be unneccesarily expensive.

It’s 19:00 and it’s time for the e-tv news, well there is nothing too shocking looks like the world will still be rotating tomorrow. Except maybe for some Zimbabweans who are perhaps going through one of the roughest periods in their history of independence, e-tv had some very graphic footage of the atrocities that are taking place in our neighbouring country.

When I hear a gunshot coming from my neighbours house, I catch myself running to the door, stopping mid way to think, then I call the police and maybe a few other neighbours. Strength in numbers you know, maybe we’ll be brave enough to go over and see if we can help or catch a culprit or be witness. Then here comes along Mr. ANC president Jacob Zuma with this statement: “I cannot prescribe what to do in Zimbabwe…” Well something along those lines, I couldn’t hear very well over my own groaning as he started to speak.

Prescribe –“ to lay down as a guide, direction, or rule of action” or “to designate or order the use of as a remedy” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Now, I think we are way past “prescribing” when people are being brutalised only a border away, we are way past strategising and studying and watching.

It’s either our government acts or it doesn’t but they shouldn’t undermine our intelligence by throwing words like “prescribe” at us. Tell us are you going to do something or not? And if not then are you listening to the voices of your people at all?