I went upstairs yesterday to find these posters pinned up on various walls. My younger son, ever the entrepeneur (albeit a lazy one), was obviously bored. I should have found them amusing, but instead they triggered a gut reaction in me, a slight nausea in the pit of my stomach. It took me a few minutes to realise why. The posters, despite their innocence, were far too reminiscent of ones that I have seen in historical portraits of the Great Depression. The words are the words of a 10-year-old but they are poignantly prophetic with their implication of being around and available for an interview all day.
The realisation of what we could potentially be facing struck me like a physical blow to my solar plexus. Of course, I've spent innumerable hours since the lockdown worrying about our economy. I'm sure we all have. And I know on a theoretical level how many people risk losing their jobs over the next few weeks (many have already lost their jobs), but something about my son's poster brought the reality of job loss from the theoretical to the realm of the very personal.
My husband and I are in a rather unique position in that we are both healthcare workers. This puts us in a tricky position and one that we are constantly trying to wrap our heads around. We have practice running costs that still need to be met, despite us seeing only emergencies. Our future is uncertain. We don't know whether we will both be working shifts in ICU/ER in the near future or whether we will stay in this limbo, hoping that we will be able to afford to pay staff over the next few months. But we are lucky. Despite the financial uncertainty, despite the potential of having to leave children at home alone all day while we cover emergencies, despite the risk of us getting COVID, we are so, so lucky. We have a great home, we have food, we have running water (as I write this I cant help thinking about what a ridiculous statement that is: we are lucky because we have running water. That shouldn't be luck! That should be a basic right.) and we are fairly certain, one way or another, once this is all over we will still be able to earn a living.
There are so many people who are in desperately worse off positions than us and I am not only talking about the very poor, who have absolutely nothing. I am thinking about people like my brother, who is a chef, and whose foreseeable future is very, very barren. I think about people who have small businesses that don't have the reserve to survive 5 weeks of no income. And I think of the staff that will suffer as these businesses collapse. The reality is that often these staff members- the waitrons, the cashiers, the people who keep small industries alive- support numerous others with their income.
My posts so far have been relatively lighthearted and I have specifically tried to keep most of them that way, because one can become completely bogged down in depressing news, but it is important to be reminded, on occasion, of the harsh reality that so many people close to us in so many specifically South African ways (I'm thinking of our domestic workers, our gardeners, the car guard who knows us by name, the waiter who always remembers our order) may face.
We are good in South Africa at feeling gratitude because there is always someone worse off to compare oneself to. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling gratitude. Gratitude shifts your paradigm so that you don't feel so bad and so that your problems seem temporarily more trivial, but unfortunately gratitude doesn't help those people who are less fortunate. Now is a time that we need more than gratitude. We need action. We all need to be accountable for those less fortunate than us, on every level. We need to support local small businesses in any way that we can. We need to try our best to pay our staff and if we can't afford to pay full salaries, then we need to pay what we can honestly afford. We need to try and save jobs where we can. We need to do the small stuff: donate food parcels, hygeine packs and, as winter approaches, blankets. The ravages of the virus aside, the only way that South Africa will be able to come through the economic fallout of this pandemic is by pulling together. I think we have a word for it: Ubuntu.
Now, let me go and draw up a contract for my son...
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