Ellis Park was at it's usual Test fever pitch when we arrived for the SA / France rugby test (see the previous blog, Taxi,Taxi for our transport tale!) The brick and concrete passages and ramps were crammed with over 40 000 fans, predominantly green and gold (who could not stare at the grown man in his Springbok onesie, complete with a horned hood!) although the dude with a stuffed imitation chicken hat, with legs and a head flopping listlessly alongside his jaw was also a good sighting.
Vendors selling biltong (beef jerky), soft drinks, flags and ice cream clambered up and down the stands, waving samples of their wares hopefully at the crowd and doing a fair business because being a noisy, interactive spectator is physically demanding work equalling the brute force activity on the pitch.
Crowd watching is always entertaining, a vastly diverse mix of spectators in groups large and small different in every detail except one - their enthusiasm for rugby. Beer flowed, voices roared and 'our' team were giving the opposition a reasonable thumping. Life is good.
Or not. The sun had long packed up for the day, allowing winter chill occupation of the stadium. Concrete, cold's best friend, eagerly absorbed and passed on the rapidly dropping temperature and it was then that THE ice cream seller climbed up towards us.
Aged somewhere in his mid 20's, his solemn face was the only motionless object in the stadium. His eyes, dull with hopelessness, arrested my gaze and clutched my soul. I felt his story.
Who knows how hard he fought to get a job selling ice cream in winter to a crowd more intent on beer? How many taxi's did he have to catch to get to the stadium, and how much of that single day's earnings did transport suck up? How many ice creams would he sell and would he be in trouble with his employer for not selling them all? Did he have a long, cold journey home in the dark, late on a Saturday night ahead of him. All this to earn what? R50? R100? And what about tomorrow? Rugby is seasonal and the stadium not regularly used.
A tsunami of guilt washed from my head to my toes, radiating through Him Outdoors absorption with the match. Shaking his head at my story, he bought ice creams we didn't want and asked what else we could do?
The minute rational part of my brain agreed. We are in no financial shape to change the life of one extra person, let alone the millions of needy around us. Adopting a local creche and doing what we can within our means has us at our limits. But it is not making a difference to the bigger picture of desperation and need, which continues to grow like an untreatable dread disease.
Amidst thousands of people spending hundreds of Rands on watching a single rugby match, here was an individual doing his damnedest to scrape some survival money. Some would say he's lucky, he got the gig but is that really good enough?
South Africans are thoroughly overwhelmed by the immensity of the need in this country. Monthly, jobs are shed. Inflation pushes against constraints. Millions of people live incredibly hard lives just trying to survive and make do. How many are able to improve their lot? And the politicians continue to bicker, deceive, play magician games with the economy and peoples lives - the SASSA debacle is an outrageous crime against humanity, in my view. And that's just one in a basket of indecent governance issues, albeit probably one of the most critical considering SASSA pays grants to the most desperate in society.
It's too easy, being overwhelmed by the numbers, to generalise and switch off to the sea of hopelessness we live in. But sometimes, it's a photograph by Sam Nzima or Kevin Carter, highlighting an individual, that finally breaks the protective wall of our complacency.
My anonymous ice cream seller was that individual to me. Seeing a person and not a crowd made the problem real and not a number. But I still don't have any ideas to make a real difference in the larger picture.
My 20-something year old sons have hope - they are making their own way in the world but they have the resilience and the tools to cope with the challenges along the way. They have the confidence to stride out for their dreams, and the bounce to recover from setbacks. They got these qualities from a comfortable, supportive home where food, warmth, power, water and transport were always available. Parents who established rules and, alongside their rights, taught responsibilities. Parents who dropped them off at school in the morning and were home in time to cook dinner and supervise homework.
These, I believe, are the essential foundations of any society. We can't throw 'entrepreneurship' around and expect people to make a success of this difficult path just because it suits the government to throw this back on it's citizenry rather than create sustainable jobs. Or education. Or ensure that health and decent homes are available to all.
'Cry the Beloved Country' has become popular among the chattering class on social media but I refuse to cry for a collective. I'll weep for a young man who is a Born Free, and without prospect.
No comments:
Post a Comment