We all live such cosseted lives, where we imagine that our daily struggles are of the life-and-death variety. How wrong we are.
Back in the bad old days, when I was a journalist, human misery was my stock-in-trade. Hardly a day went by that I didn’t witness a corpse in a pool of blood, speak to victims of violence or other criminal nastiness, or get a glimpse into the brutalised, horrible existence of some unfortunate soul. As one of my drivers used to incessantly philosophise, “man is a pig”.
But having moved out of journalism several years ago and being of much more pedestrian habits nowadays, I’ve grown accustomed to the quiet suburban life. My worries are those of many of us: paying the bills, barking dogs, my neighbourhood’s crime rate, making sure my child is fed, clothed and happy.
Virtually my entire working life is spent sitting in front of my terminal in the Flow writing studio, which is just the way I like it. Every now and then I sally forth into the wider world for a client, but nothing unpredictable ever happens. Until a couple of days ago.
Etana Insurance is a company where pretty much anything can happen, and often does, but this sojourn left its people speechless, too. It was a group visit to Hillbrow, where Etana has been supporting the civilian street patrollers, so that they could see for themselves what Etana’s corporate social investment (CSI) team does to help others.
The patrollers are certainly a worthy cause. Unarmed and unpaid, they guard over some of South Africa’s most dangerous streets; they do it because they live there and are sick of the crime. They were at pains to tell us that seven years ago, when they started patrolling, Hillbrow was a much worse place than it is now. But that’s difficult to imagine.
I must point out that I have a personal connection with Hillbrow: I was born there. But that was in the late 1960s, when it was the cool place in South Africa, and it stayed that way right up into the 1980s. Even now, people remember fondly how cosmopolitan, safe and popular it was.
Now, normally these sorts of CSI walkabouts are highly controlled, and the Etana one was, too. But while the terribly run-down buildings, trash-filled streets and distinctly dodgy-looking characters on many street corners were to be expected, none of us could have foreseen the place known locally as “Bishop’s Park”.
This unofficial name is for the drug lord who controls it, and it’s no longer a safe recreational space. It’s populated by drug dealers and their captive clientele: scores of haunted, sick addicts, who live and drug right there in the park, because the dealers are there and the nyaope (a form of heroin) is the cheapest in Johannesburg.
The sight of them was beyond tragic. Filthy and ragged, their eyes sunken and their pallor grey, they stood around aimlessly. We were warned not to take photographs of them, as many of them want to remain anonymous in their wretchedness and can react violently otherwise.
As one of our hosts showed us a gram of nyaope – it’s that typical greyish-yellow of so many kinds of impure street drug – one of the addicts sidled up. A young woman, she had clearly been living rough for some time and had a desperate edge about her. Her motive for moving closer was not hard to glean: police raids had resulted in there being nothing to score for four days, she said.
But she didn’t get what she had hoped for; instead, the Etanans (many of whom, I suspect, are pillars of their communities and were utterly out of their comfort zones) peppered her with questions.
Does she live there? Yes, she said. Why can’t she go home and clean up? If she knew how, she would, she replied. Where does she get money? Begging (although I’m willing to bet that there’s more to it than that response.) What does she do for food? “When you smoke heroin, you don’t worry about food,” she said, her tone flat and listless.
My heart broke for this young woman, whose name was not asked. She’s a lost soul. What little human dignity she has left will soon be gone, destroyed by that monkey on her back, and chances are that she’ll eventually die in Bishop’s Park, like others have. Will anyone grieve for her? Do they know where she is now?
Soon, we were bundled back into our bus and taken back to our suburban world. Along the way we passed little knots of schoolchildren on their way home, and all I could think was that that addict was once like them – and I wondered how their parents will ever keep them safe from the horrors of Bishop’s Park, and all the other evil places in Hillbrow.
By comparison, my daily worries mean little. This trip gave me some long-overdue perspective about what really matters, but it afforded me no comfort. The world really is a harsh and unforgiving place, and we would do well to remember that just around the corner, as Hillbrow is from Etana’s head office, there are invariably people who would love to call our problems theirs.