I HAVE A NAME

Little Mercy for Joburg’s invisible people goes a long way

MERCY doesn’t look like your typical street beggar. She is stylishly dressed as she gingerly steers her blind uncle, Joseph, through the snarl of traffic at a Fourways roadside. That’s where she meets Jedidjah Rotter, a suburban mother of three.

She tells Mercy she is a storyteller; she wants to hear about her life and to help her however she can. Mercy opens up, telling Rotter how she worked in sales at a big shopping mall in Zimbabwe until it closed down. She lost her job.

“I have four children. They are 13, 12, nine and three. I’ve left them behind (in Zimbabwe) with my husband who also doesn’t have a job. Everything I make I try to send back to them,” she says.

“My children are in school, but they are hungry all the time. I bring my uncle here to Fourways because he was begging in the streets where he stays. He wasn’t getting much because people there are poor.”

It’s for Joburg’s “invisible” residents like Mercy that the 40-year-old Rotter started her I Have a Name project on Facebook two months ago.

She writes brief stories about these impoverished, and often unseen people and, if they agree, she takes their pictures and posts their stories on to the page with their contact details.

“There’s always help of some kind afterwards,” she smiles.

But no money or donations ever reaches her – Rotter insists that those who want to help get in touch with the profiled person directly.

For the Dutch-born Rotter, I Have a Name was “an exercise for myself to be more intentional in my interactions with those that I come across daily… be it at a stop street, a traffic light, or walking along the road”, she explains.

“Even though I knew I couldn’t change the huge divide between rich and poor in South Africa, I could at least change the way I viewed people who were not like me… without preconceived ideas and judgments.”

The page already has 10 000 fol- lowers but, most importantly, it’s changing lives. “When some of these stories went viral, I thought ‘oh my goodness, what have I started?’ Now it feels like my fulltime non-paying job,” she laughs.

Rotter is reluctant to have her own photograph taken, insisting the project is not about her, but about inspiring awareness.

She remembers encountering Aprocarne, a 92-year-old homeless man on the pavement outside her townhouse complex after Youth Day. “I thought I’ll buy him a lunch, but not just give it to him, sit down and talk to him. He had no teeth at all and was difficult to understand. He had nobody in his life.

“His was the first story I wrote on my personal Facebook page. Then, I thought maybe if I make the page public, someone can help get him into a shelter.”

He vanished, but the idea was born. “All of a sudden I started seeing people, chatting to them and hearing their interesting stories.”

Rotter describes herself as a mother and a photographer, who grew up in East Africa to mission- ary parents and has lived in South Africa, Dubai and later Istanbul, where she worked with refugees.

She and her supportive husband and three daughters returned to South Africa in 2013.

“I think if you’ve been out of the country and back again, things are just glaringly obvious that maybe people living here are used to – the divide between rich and poor. Motorists ignore people at robots and try to avoid making eye contact. I remember saying to myself I’m not going to do that, but then you just do.”

Don’t write people off at first glance. Instead, “make a difference”, she says. “Smile at the guy standing at the robot, or ask your domestic worker how much it costs for her to travel home.” Cross bridges, she says. “My hope and prayer is that through these stories of individuals on our streets, and in our neighbourhoods, you will start to see people for who they really are… people with hopes, and dreams, with feelings, who love and cry. People just like you and me.”