It must be all the news reports of flooding in Centurion and that tragic accident in Bela Bela that got filed in the wrong parts of my memory.
My wife looked at the story of the national news paper last week and said something that got me thinking. “This is happening really close to home. Not in some foreign country. It could happen here…” well my dear wife in all her wisdom made a good point. What would we do if a flood came rolling on through eMalahleni? Imagine waking up one morning and your bed is floating down the street. We would be stuck in a bed traffic jam because the robots would be out.
Imagine pitching a tent on the roof of your house and the highlight of your day is not being swept away by the raging waters all around you, and finding your Frisbee that got stuck in the gutter.
It is not something I can imagine for very long. Yet reading about it on one page, and then turning over to the next where Oscar Pistorius’s case is examined in detail, helped me to realise that the world keeps turning. Oscar needs to get to court by jet ski, or hovercraft or parachute.
In eMalahleni we have power cuts, and water quality problems, and bad roads, and other services that we feel might be lacking, but we still go to the mall to buy a new TV, or we capitalize on it and open a generator re-sale store. It might be possible that as you are sitting on the roof of your house, you get a smoke signal message from your boss wondering why you are not at work yet?
I have a point to this even though the point might resemble a knot by now. It is that we are a resilient bunch of people. We will keep on keeping on, whether it is the weather, service delivery, our high crime rate, or a weird mixture of all of the above.
So how about renewing another season of Survivor and the tagline can be “Braving the Highveld”.
