Where the itch is worst
AS MUCH as many of us despise a nocturnal visit by a whining bloodthirsty mosquito there is one thing about the little bloodsucker you have to admire … at least you know without a doubt where you’ve been stung.
Of course having a mozzie bite under your third toe from the left, on your right foot, while you are wearing a boot, and having lunch with some very important, high profile and prominent visitors at a posh restaurant can be off-putting to say the least.
I mean, what do you do? You can’t very well unlace your boot and do what NEEDS to be done – prop your appendage up on the table and give it a good work-over with the silver-plated cake fork; that would be frowned upon in polite society.
And we all know how important it is to fit in to polite society and visit posh establishments rubbing shoulders with prominent members of the world’s upper crust … who know what canapés are.
However, there’s that other itch – that phantom itch, where you whip off your boot and try to scratch, but you discover that it’s not a mozzie bite, and that scratching that spot brings no relief. Sometimes scratching your elbow brings relief; I wonder what chemical weapons the mosquitos developed to get that right.
I experienced a societal phantom itch this past week when I visited the fairest Cape. My travels took me to some posh areas of Cape Town and some really upmarket restaurants … where well groomed and polite service staff served me canapés.
In one ethereal afternoon I experienced how the top one percent (the richest of the rich) lives.
A day later I was visiting the overcrowded, impoverished and smelly shantytown area of a township called Philippi, situated between Mitchells Plain and Grassy Park.
My mind begged me to return to the fragrant, spacious lush seven-star hotel I had seen the previous day, and I realised that this is what Oxfam was saying, when they reported that the world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest HALF of the globe’s population.
One of my travelling companions mentioned that what we were seeing in this broken, ramshackle township plagued with all of society’s worst problems isn’t close to the squalor that he had seen in Asia; and I felt as if my head was caving in.
But it was here, in the middle of the place where I least wanted to be that I saw real hope for our country’s youth. An organisation called Amandla Development has taken on the task of making a difference, which seemed impossible from where I was standing; after all Philippi has a school dropout rate of over 50 percent. For every 10 students who enter the system, only two will qualify for university. And youth unemployment is over 70 percent!
Amandla Development is running a programme called “100 for 100” aimed at ensuring that ALL Philippi’s students have the support they need to stay in school; and one of the things that impressed me most is that before Amandla’s people go in and make sweeping changes their young peer educators LISTEN to the youth to discover where THEY are struggling before any initiatives are formulated.
According to the bright young man heading the operation things are slowly starting to turn around. Amandla Development is operating in 12 of the 24 schools in the area, and with baby steps, things are starting to change in the community.
A visit to the humble operation’s website at amandladevelopment.org can be eye-opening and a good place to start for many of us who do not quite know what to do … as far as I can tell, Amandla Development is scratching in the right place to relieve our country’s phantom itch.