Advance warning: this post is a ranting one.
Around 80% of the time, I'm a glass-half-full-of-awesome-sauce about South Africa. I love our country, it's beautiful, it's fill with amazing people who are poised to do astounding things. But then, for that other 20% of the time, I really do have to sit back and wonder.
So. Picture the scene. Saturday. A room full of cancer patients are waiting for their radiation treatments, that they've had to go for on a Saturday because the radiation facility's equipment was broken on Thursday and Friday - both days on which they kept the patients waiting for their dose of hope for six hours and more, without very much information or care.
Back to Saturday. There's a beverage station in the waiting room. Nice. Only every single cup is dirty, and the ones that were clean have been dirtied by what is obviously a spill - so the cups that were rim-down on the tray, are all dirty too. There's no milk. The water cooler is empty.
I asked one of the ladies if there's a dishwasher (meaning a machine) that can be loaded so that the people waiting for treatment (and the people waiting with them) can have something to drink out of a clean cup.
"No," she says. " There are only two of us here today, and there's no maid to wash the dishes."
That, on top of a very interesting and pretty hardcore day at the Daily Maverick's Gathering 2.0 on Friday, brought it home.
People just don't care. They don't care enough to do the little things that could ease someone's day - so why should they begin to care about the big things? How are we going to get anywhere, if we don't start taking care of the small details - simple caring actions that will make someone smile, give someone hope, change someone's perceptions about a stereotype?
Well, all I could do at the time was wash dishes. So I did. I washed the cups and saucers, dried them, cleaned the tray, and loaded the milk jug. All in the time it took for one five minute radiation treatment. Not exactly hard labour, and not exactly time consuming.
Next time someone asks you for a (metaphorical) clean cup - what are you going to do?
2 comments:
Yup. And yup.
It’s so disheartening when I hear of things like this. People have stopped caring. And you’re so right, we’ll never get the big things right if we can’t get the small things done.
It’s sad.
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