ROSEHILL resident, Kelisha Hariparsad, matriculated six years ago with seven distinctions. Armed with seven distinctions, she thought she would study medicine in a sky-scraping metropolitan city – instead she found herself in Mthatha.
She writes monthly for the Northglen News about her experiences in the rural town.
WHILE the Mrs Universe pageant was held recently in Durban, here in Mthatha we have a formal event of our own coming up. The ‘Med Ball’ is an annual evening affair for final year students, and always a big deal.
There will be some parallels between pageant contestants and ourselves, such as glamming up, but being Mthatha there are bound to be some perpendiculars too.
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This place is just a fascinating mixture of rural and metropolitan. I could turn up at our fancy hotel venue in a million dollar dress, yet with hair done sloppily by myself – because there aren’t any salons here that know what to do with my hair. And heaven forbid we won’t have access to electricity and running water that day!
Last week there was a water outage that lasted two days. It happens every so often. There would be no bathing, no water to drink, no washing of the messy dishes unless we traipsed down to the river to collect water in buckets. Alright, I lie – there’s no river. We can buy bottled water from Spar. There’s also the options of Pick ‘n Pay or Checkers situated around the corner from the Guess and Vogue stores. We have a Fabiani nearby too but, for some reason, just not a reliable supply of water.
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There’s a theory that does the rounds – apparently whenever it rains heavily the reservoir overflows and compromises the supply. I spent the two days bitterly convinced we must be the only place on Earth that won’t get water because it is raining outside.
“I lay in one spot like a starfish most of the time, agonizing over the sordid situation. I refused to see people. What if the sauce-smeared dishes in the sink attracted cockroaches which would multiply uncontrollably to create a monstrous infestation from which my flat could not be saved.”
I would have to move out, and Spar would no longer be nearby, and I would probably die of dehydration next water cut. And what if, heaven forbid, no man ever wanted to marry me because the outage had made me such a miserable old, unattractive wreck of a woman.
When the water eventually came back I forgot all about it, so fickle was the problem, as are 99 per cent of the problems we think we have.
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