REMEMBER when we had drinking water in abundance… and a stable supply of electricity?
Sigh! Those were the days.
Nostalgia is definitely an ‘age’ thing… like Springbok Radio, the ‘Creaking Door’, ‘Inspector Carr Investigates’ and the ‘Three Wise Men’.
Heck! One has to be close to 50 to remember the TV test pattern and when there were no cellphones!
Unfortunately, when it comes to water and electricity it is also a ‘privileged’ thing.
The vast majority of this country’s population – especially in rural areas – wouldn’t have those ‘fond memories’ in the first place. Taps in homes and electricity are only recent ‘luxuries’ for many.
Their memories will be of dispatching children with stained containers to lug water from muddy streams, communal boreholes or taps located far from home, come rain or shine.
Photographs of ‘ingenious’ inventions like a wheelbarrow with a water container as a wheel and ‘play-and-pump’ kids’ merry-go-rounds were proudly published in many newspapers.
Will those people remember their old routines with fondness? Would you?
Now that we are all suffering the effects of El Niño, most people in the ‘burbs can afford to buy bottled water and are more worried about when they will next be able to top up their pools, use their garden sprinklers and wash their cars with hoses.
Heaven forbid that there’s no water to shower, bath or flush the loo.
Yet there are communities just inland of the coastal belt which have been faced with actual thirst for months, never mind a few days of inconvenience due to burst pipes or a faulty pump station.
There’s hardly a ‘tweet’ on social media from those who suffer the most. For many of them, it’s back to where they were not so many years ago.
What brought this tirade on, you might ask?
Last week the Herald published a photograph of a child’s feet, badly calloused from walking to school every day without shoes. It was his dream to own a pair.
Many people and businesses rallied round admirably and SAPS members even donated shoes, not only to the boy, but to the school.
It was a feel-good story, but what spoiled it all for Zimasa Mgwili, the Herald journalist whose photograph inspired so much goodwill, was one phone call.
Zimasa and her colleagues were speechless when our reception relayed a message from an angry woman: “Why didn’t the Herald just buy the kid a pair of shoes instead of making us all feel guilty?”
One can only hope that the caller reads this and rediscovers her sense of ‘ubuntu’ (or ‘humanness’).
The ‘good old days’ and nostalgia be damned.
