SANITY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER IN SA
THIS weekend, Belhar was ahum with activity. Our church held a bazaar, a traditional village foodfare, where inhabitants could relax and commune.
The food on offer, plus fresh produce and sweetmeats, created a bonhomie for which we don’t always have the time.
More events like this should be held to promote social cohesion at the most basic level.
The exercise has immeasurable potential for social and spiritual growth.
We now also have a muscular neighbourhood watch covering our entire C-shaped street.
At the spearhead is the indefatigable Neil and his posse of young Spartans. They make our days and nights safer in a world where the ungodly is poised to take the upper hand.
It is a one-size-fits-all model of collective action. They work closely with the SAPS. The word is out that our street is no longer a hang-out for the ungodly. Nor are our family members helpless prey for the predators.
Belhar also has its cleansing department. No, not the weekly collection of bins by the council, but the visitors to our bins who remove whatever is recyclable before the truck trundles in. This they turn into money to feed their families.
Perhaps we should help them by changing the way we throw out the rubbish.
Then there are the one-man gardening services, led by the eversmiling James, who buy what used to be edge-trimmers and are now lawnmowers. They will trim your garden for a reasonable fee.
In all this I see brave souls who are embattled by indifferent and sometimes hostile hegemony. In the early morning, our streets are aroar with cars which scuttle towards the highways to join the lemming trek to the CBD.
No one thinks to move the jobs closer to where the people are. These commuters brave the stressful trip each day, a trip made even more nightmarish by the cowboys who drive taxis and tell the law to go and suck eggs.
These flouters of the law even neutralised the pathetic efforts of the two bus services that already struggled to cope with the volume of passengers.
I have tried to sketch life in my little town. It is the same all over. Our ship of state is floundering against relentless headwinds.
But we need to know that the government is not only for partycard holders.
They should see us all as legal, taxpaying, child-rearing parents, uncles, aunts, gogos – indeed, the whole cross section of a nation who daily experiences more fear than hope. Our president should know we have his back.
We have our eye on newly appointed ministers who suddenly discover that a family member is ideally suited for a job for which there was no advertisement, nor interviews, nor transparency. That is nepotism. We are not fooled.