Dear Mr President- It May be Almost Over, But I Hope You've Learnt...

I am glad the public sector strike is coming to an end.  However, I do not think that the government has listened to what the problems are. 

I am affected by this strike. My aunt who is very sick and cannot afford medical aid fell sick a couple of weeks ago and was turned away from Chris Hani Baragwanath twice because nurses were on strike. Her illness progressed until she couldn’t walk. The family had to gather money to take her to a specialist who then had to phone Baragwanath and insist that they admit her. Thank God she didn’t die.

I went to visit her on Saturday in hospital. I haven’t been to Baragwanath in more than five years and I was shocked that nothing has changed. They have not repainted, retiled, the machinery has not been updated. And if healthcare is a priority to government why is it then that this hospital that services one of the most congested regions in our country has not been properly maintained?

Imagine then, all you people who do not get why nurses who have to work twelve hour days six days a week in such environments are angry, that you are a nurse at Baragwanath and you are expected to work with malfunctioning machinery.

Why are teachers on strike? When last did you take a walk through a township school? We sit here pretending that we get it. We get the anger. We do not teach children who come to school hungry, we do not teach children who have HIV or are raped on a daily basis by a relative, we do not teach children who are raising their siblings, we do not teach in schools where there is no electricity and desks and chairs are either broken or in short supply.

Where children who attend schools in suburbs can afford to buy their own exercise books most of the children whose teachers are on strike only receive exercise books in March and have to share textbooks. Do you get the frustration of the mess that these public servants have to muddle through?

Add the fact that our elected officials squander money on luxuries while basic needs are not met. They cannot give teachers and nurses and other public servants increases yet they can afford to throw multimillion rand parties.

They cannot afford to upgrade schools without the help of private funds but they can afford to attend international conferences.

They cannot afford to fix hospitals and equip them properly yet they can afford to spend millions on pushing forward bills that will protect their corruption from being revealed.

I should be angry at nurses for going on strike and depriving my aunt of decent healthcare. Yet I know that even if nurses weren’t on strike, the hospital my aunt is in isn’t giving her the best healthcare because the hospital is derelict and unkempt.

I can only hope that government keeps its promise to give the poor proper healthcare and education because at the rate they are going, it will not be unruly public servants that they will be dealing with but the poor who are forced to use crumbling infrastructure.

And They Said It Was A Wedding To Remember...

I have been to some pretty amazing weddings. I mean, amazing! Some weddings are just what a wedding should be sometimes communal, sometimes intimate, but always about two people vowing before God and man to be one and to honour each other until they draw their last breaths. You feel honoured to be invited and you imagine that should you ever get married, you want your wedding to be like theirs!

And then there are the other kind of weddings. You know what I mean, you have been to one. The ones you wish your invite had gotten lost in the post or you had not wasted a perfectly good Saturday and attended. Here are my experiences of the most annoying, ill organised or bizarre wedding I have ever attended…

Power to the Hood

I’m not hating on township weddings, a cousin of mine got married in the heart of Soweto and it turned out pretty well, but then there was this wedding I went to…

It took place in a community hall. The bride had just turned nineteen and she wore a white wedding dress with a five meter trail.  I kid you not. In a dusty township. That was the beginning. Her bridesmaids wore electric pink satin like fabric dresses…the shine, oh, the shine. Her father, who walked her down the isle, had on a tie in the same fabric and the bridegroom was also in white!

There is no black wedding without istep! And God, did they choreograph it. They were getting down in perfect symmetry. It took the bridesmaids and the groomsmen twenty minutes to get to the end of the isle and the Mifikizolo track was repeated four times!  

And of course what is a wedding in the hood without the two hour photo session while your guests are starving waiting for the newly weds to return. I said guests? I mean the invited guests, and the guests invited by the guests and the guests invited by the guests who are invited by the invited guests.  And never enough chairs and tables to accommodate even the invited guests.

And then there is the convoy around the hood in borrowed BMWs where the hooters are going off like it’s going out of fashion. I said that people are still waiting for to be fed while all this is going on, right?

There is nothing like a hood wedding!

I went five star then ran out of money

The power of This is what I want versus this is what I can afford…this is often revealed in the tiniest of details. A lot of sensible people step back and they throw they best wedding they can afford while others will put up the façade and then…

I should have known when I had to drive through four kilometres of gravel that it wasn’t good. The wedding lodge had a postcard sized board announcing it’s existence. It was a beautiful brownstone building and we were ready for a good wedding.

Ten minutes before the wedding started we made our way to the gazebo by the river and patiently waited for the wedding couple.

First the Master of Ceremony announced that the groom was running late. It was funny for the fist half hour after a full hour I started worrying about the bride…she could be ditched at the alter. Then shortly after that the groom arrived. My ass was sore from sitting for an hour waiting for his tardy highness to decide he was ready to get married. Then we had to wait for the bride who showed up in a boat.

How horribly romantic. It would have been have we not have been kept waiting for two whole hours.  They were pronounced man and wife and it was announced that the guests had to carry their chairs to the marquee. 

Okay, first I need to describe the scenery. From the gazebo, where my ass was hurting after sitting for almost three hours waiting for the bridal couple, was a thirty degree steep climb up a hill to get to the marquee. An easy feat if I wasn’t wearing twelve centimetre stiletto heels and if the hill wasn’t grass, never mind me carrying a chair.

I was not about to climb a grassy hill in my stilettos carrying a chair!

If they wanted to go for full on pretension they should have either rented out more chairs or hired porters to carry the damned chairs!

You didn’t come here for the food, right?

People normally starve themselves before weddings hoping for a feast.

So imagine, you are invited to a wedding and you are already thinking about the chocolate dessert at the end of it all, and you sit through the bride walking down the isle with some chick who can’t sing singing Hillsong and assaulting your ears and you ignore it all and pretend that it is the most magnificent wedding you’ve ever attended. You sigh and clap at all the appropriate places and you just want the reception to come around just so you can have some food!

Ha! The reception is not really a reception but a little block of time set aside for the bride and groom to thank everyone for coming to their “big” day. Where is the food you ask?

Small little cucumber and cheese sandwiches, water and some grape juice?

You still hungry?

Woman To Woman

Life would be easier for me if I was the type of person who surrounds themselves with tons of people and if I had a million friends and no meaningful friendships. I suppose I could go out every weekend and paint the town red and not be content to stay at home and have an intimate conversation about the state of my life with my closest friends.

I’ve railed about reality television. But there is something else that bothers me about celebrities. Why is it when celebrities throw a party of and invite hundreds of people we hear that they “invited two hundred of their closest friends”. How close are your friends to you if you need two hundred of them?

For me a friendship is something intimate. Maybe because some time in my young life when I was most melancholic I had so many people around me and I still felt loneliness. And when I started cutting my so-called friends out of my life and I was left with only three girls who got me and loved me, I didn't feel a need to pretend to have it together when I didn't.

My friendship acid-test is asking myself: When all chips are down who will I call? That's how I know who is closest to me.

I am blessed to have a fabulous, down-to-earth God fearing mother. I feel like my mother lifts me when I’m down and no matter how much I mess up, I know she’ll be there to pull me through. She is tough talking, she pushes hard and expects so much from me. Yet she is loving and compassionate. My mother is not my friend, nor has she ever wanted to be. Her role in my life is to guide me, even if I feel like I don’t want the guidance. This relationship is a foundation for so many other relationships. A lot of who I am, is because of who my mother is (only the good stuff!)

I am also blessed to have a sister who is also my bestest friend. My sister will walk through coals for me. We are alike as we are different. We fight furiously, and we also love with the same intensity. If I’m down she feels like it’s her responsibility to lift me up. I can tell her anything and know that it won’t go any further. She tries to fix all the brokenness in my life and I love her for it.  Hell, if all my friends turned against me I know she’ll still be there to hold me up. I suppose having her around makes it easier for me to shed the unhealthy relationships I have in my life.

I also have fabulous female friends. About three. At most. Really. It’s not that I can’t stand other women. I love women around me. It’s just that I hate being lied to, even with good intention. If something in my life is broken and I can’t see it, I want my girl to tell me this. I want friends who know me, and really care to know me. They must know the good and the bad and accept both. It’s taken me years to realise that I need friends who are strong, maybe not in the way I am but strong none the less. I want friends who put in the time to call me a friend, just like I should put in the time to call them friend. I want friends who can look beyond the cosmetic and dig deep.

In my life I have also been blessed with a female boss.  And really, the three above relationships form a basis of this relationship going in. I didn’t get here and think she’s a woman therefore my enemy. When she corrects me, I listen and try to heed her advice without taking it personal. This does have a lot to do with the kind of females I have around me outside of work. When my girls disagree with me, they tell me so. They aren’t afraid to criticise me and praise me.

I don’t have space for pettiness in my life. Seriously. I had a friend once, I’d do something and she wouldn’t tell me then months later, amidst a crowd of people she would reveal my sin for all to hear. I hated this, and I told her this and yet she still didn’t get it. Another old friend of mine hates praising another woman if it might be construed that the other female is better than she is.  Telling another woman she looks good doesn’t mean you are saying you don’t.

I wish we would get to a point in our lives as women where we don’t feel a need to pull each other down. Where we accept each other and stop tearing down perfectly good woman to woman relationships because we feel insecure.

To the women in my life, my life is so much better because of you. Love you! Happy birthday Mom and may you see many more beautiful years!

PROPOSED PROTECTION OF INFORMATION BILL AND THE MEDIA APPEALS TRIBUNAL

The powers that be would like us not to react to this proposal until it’s too late. A few puzzling legislations have been put forward this year. The first was a ban on internet pornography. Most of us didn’t object and I was one who thought it a good idea. Mainly for the reason that there is nothing that annoys me more than porn pop-ups. You go onto a site to download music and what do you know, a pair of oversized silicone tits greet you. Very annoying. So I said yes, internet porn should be banned!

And then the Protection of Information Bill (proposed section 75) crept up. In the beginning I didn’t react. I didn’t realise what was at stake. So, like all things I don’t like, I ignored it and thought the storm will pass. There is no way in hell this will be taken seriously, especially not by comrades who fought in the “struggle”. And then it hit me. Not out of the blue, mind, but through a slow building media campaign against the bill.

I listened to the debates on radio and I read the blogs and the newspaper articles and columns. And the ANC was making valid points and so was the media.  But then I thought again. I thought why would such a bill be necessary? How would it affect me? And could this be the start of “Big Brother is Watching You”?

I don’t dispute that some information should be kept confidential for the security of our country. Citizens do not need to know everything. Which is why the Promotion of Access to Information Act (Act No. 2 OF 2000) exists, to ensure that confidential and sensitive information is protected. But should the mismanagement of public funds be deemed as secret information?

What bothers me with the whole debate is the establishment of a Media Appeals Tribunal. Fining journalists and throwing them in jail for publishing public interest stories is a bit extreme. As long as I pay my taxes I should know where that money is going and how it’s being managed. When I hear members of the ruling party say that journalists who write stories that don’t contribute positively to the South Africa that they are building should pay fines and thrown in jail for daring to write such stories is a little scary. Not all stories can be positive. Corrupt officials should be exposed. Heinous crimes need to be reported on.

There is information we can protect but let’s face it. Information is power. If I live under a deluded cloud that South Africa is a gun free zone, I’ll be tempted to leave my doors unlocked at night. And how will I know which party to vote for if information regarding the misdeeds of certain parties filtered?

Maybe that is the point of the bill. But think about this scenario. If it starts with journos being thrown in jail. The next stop will be you being fined for stuff you post on Twitter and Facebook. After that what you read will also be regulated. Then after that which church you go to or what you believe in, then it will be who you are in a relationship with and a before you know it you are living in George Orwell’s 1984 where the government is never wrong and everyone who dares question their decision can be thrown in jail. Sadly, that is the implication of not having press freedom in a country.

No matter how many good points the ANC comes up with for this bill and tribunal will I ever be convinced that it is the best thing for South Africa because it may not be this government, or the next government. It might not be used negatively for the next fifty years or so, but somewhere down the line someone is bound to abuse it and take us back to apartheid. It wasn’t so long ago that the only information available was propaganda, newspapers were censored, books were banned, journalists thrown behind bars and writers were forced to flee the country. Why do we want to go back there?

What's On? (The rubbish on our TVs)

I'm not much of a TV person. Give me a book, put on some good music and I'm sold. I'm not the kind of person who has a TV schedule and I have to leave work before a certain time to catch a soapie. 

If I don't watch TV for a month it doesn't make a difference to my life. But I have to admit, there is an addictive quality to TV. You know days when you don't want to think and you turn on E! Entertainment and you watch their reality TV shows for hours and you will your brain not to think. 

I think E! fans are sick of hearing about Lindsey Lohans's out of control life. If they aren't then they should be. 

I am not a fan of reality TV. I miss TV days when comedy was comedy, and you'd have drama's, and crime series', documentaries. Everything was neatly labelled and you knew you were getting escapism. 

Now it seems if I want to get lost for a minute the only place to do it is on a reality TV show. And yeah, I'm one of those viewers who is like, "are these people for real?"

Am I the only person who misses the days when a singer or a band would be on radio and you would know nothing about their personal lives. You'd have a secret crush on some guy with five kids and you wouldn't care because you wouldn't know. 

And don't you miss the days when you'd be crazy about a lead in a series and you'd call him by his stage name and he'd be real to you. And you'd know so little of the actors real life.

Are our lives so starved of any kind of excitement that we need to live vicariously through celebrities? Why should I feel dragged into Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's divorce? Why should I dislike Angelina Jolie when I don't even know her?

Why is Lindsey Lohan going to jail mean something to me? Can't she be a messed up kid who got caught up with the wrong crowd and made some bad decisions? Why oh why, someone please tell me, is she all over my TV?

I guess what I'm ranting about is that I want to watch fictitious people living fictitious lives. I want to discuss the characters with my friends as if they are real people the next day and forget about them until the next episode. 

I want to think of Beyonce as a singer and not as Jay-Z's wife and Rihanna as the girl who can't sing and not the girl who got slapped around by her boyfriend, Chris Brown.

I don't want to know the nitty gritties of people's break-ups and I sure as hell don't need to see them on my TV!