Youth need motivation, not sympahy

Youth need motivation, not sympathy, promises or handouts.

Despite all the negative turmoil of doom and gloom engulfing the poor image of the country’s young people, I always find time to chuckle and put a bright smile on my face each time I see a young person making an effort to succeed in life.

Last Wednesday, I attended a hand-over ceremony hosted by one of the long-standing supporters of this newspaper, the Vosloorus branch of the Botshelong-Clinix Group of Hospitals, who were handing over school shoes and sanitary pads to learners at the local Abinale Primary School, when my roving journalist’s eyes caught what I thought at first was one of the school’s learners neatly dressed up as a nurse for a performance at the ceremony.

I waved a “hello” and we exchanged smiles and nodded heads in acknowledgement before I took my seat just paces away. I then proceeded to unpack my camera bag and began to prepare myself for the job ahead: taking photographs of the hospital’s marketing manager, Thoko Masondo, declaring the event opened to the loud, delightful applause of hundreds of tiny hands who welcomed her and the stacks of new black shoes, socks and pads she had brought along with her.

But for some reason, my mind kept returning to the neatly dressed baby-faced tiny figure leisurely seated on a chair behind the scene. Was he going to present some special performance in honour of nurses or the nursing profession on behalf of the Clinix Group? Was he a learner or former learner at the school?

Finally, I took a deep breath and started walking towards the tiny figure with a chubby, round bespectacled face in a lily-white nurses’ top with red epaulets on the small shoulders, neat black pants and a pair of well polished black shoes. With a broad smile on my face, I politely introduced myself.

As we shook hands, his face suddenly lit up and the small-bodied 31-year-old Bheki Habede told me the most amazing story about his young and exciting life as a male nurse and how it has changed his outlook on life.

The story of Bheki Hadebe, the young man who joined the Clinix Hospital Group as a nurse-hand and then pulled himself up by his boot-straps by working hard to the position of being a departmental head at the tender age of 31, is proof that young people need motivation, not sympathy, promises and not handouts.

*Read more about Bheki Hadebe on page ???

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Escalating food prices cause for concern

There is no doubt that the current soaring food prices are having a serious impact on the lives of many families in the townships, where the high rate of unemployment is exacerbating the problem.

It is no longer a secret that many families and households in the townships are now surviving on eating just one meal a day instead of the normal three. Other families are in such dire straits they can only afford a combined family meal every second or third day as shopping bags become smaller in the face of soaring food prices.

Even non-profit, community-based feeding schemes and charitable organisations that solicit and salvage food from supermarkets to feed the needy and hungry in different parts of the township have bemoaned the scarcity of what was a few years ago in abundance and often forced upon them by food outlets.

Once again, the idea of people growing their own food in backyard vegetable gardens seems to make more sense now that it did when I first mooted it five issues back.