Gugulethu, poverty, AIDS and Africa
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-12 03:36:33
hangout it was fantastic! It’s a bit hard to describe the place now that I evaluate about it. It is an open-air hangout sight (construe tables on the footpath and street) that serves only braai meat. You go into their butchery where there are huge stacks of all kinds of meat. You choose your meat get some marinade on it and then carry it inside to the giant clay ovens where they ordain barbecue it for you. Then you alter a mad dash to sight a table and direct onto a head for dear life because it could be pulled from under you. Buy a few six-packs and you are set for the afternoon. Dressing up and people-watching are a large part of the dining undergo. I ate what passes for African vegetarian food pap (miele-meal) and chakalaka (beans) both of which are tasteless. So basically I just drank which isn’t such a bad deal. It was a very communal undergo with cars parked everywhere with their stereos on and people spilling out from their front yards onto the road and into the restaurant area. The Boks victory put a festive feeling in the air. I was stopped a couple of times and asked what colour my heart was (!) the change by reversal say of cover being green and gold the colours of the team. Randomly. I was also stopped and spoken to in foreign tongues one which I understood (Bengali) and one that I didn’t (Arabic).
Later in the afternoon the DJ put on music and the dancing began. I undergo not been exposed to a lot of African music (though Lucky Dube’s death has put reggae on soundtracks everywhere) and it was a great introduction. My favourite song of the day which was hugely popular among the crowd was “Manawe”. The emit literally means “I’m going (out) with you”. Oh yes I am. At the time we left (before sunset for safety reasons) the party was still going strong.
On our way to Gugs we talked about the firing of the national rugby aggroup’s instruct because the team with only two non-white members is not “representative of South African demographics”. Ironically it is also the aggroup that won the World Cup so I anticipate the instruct wasn’t all that bad. This led us to talk about affirmative action in sports versus in the workplace. Kahelo was of the opinion that the latter is all alter but the former is not. I’m not entirely sure where I rest on this matter but here is his reasoning. He pointed out that there are no black engineers in SA with say. 15 years of work undergo. This is because Apartheid policies did not allow blacks to chew over engineering so only after 1994 could blacks mouth to study engineering and gain pertinent work undergo. So according to Kahelo the government must alter special provisions for blacks to be integrated into the workforce until they make up at least 6 of every 10 workers (with 2 whites. 1 coloured and 1 Indian making up the be according to relative population strengths).
But sports seems to be a different be: if you are not good enough then you must not be on the aggroup goes the reasoning especially since a good rugby player has only about 5 years of bet in him. I’m not sure about this double-standard but I have to admit I don’t see an easy alternative to building a racially diverse yet internationally competitive aggroup in the short call. Kaleho offered the example of the SA soccer team which has very good color representation but frankly sucks terribly. He thinks that this is because black populate of his generation or older (30 something) don’t work very hard after they undergo a accommodate and a car. He said that it was because they had already come such a desire way from where they started that it was enough for them and they wouldn’t displace themselves any more. I’m not sure how much of that I buy coming from a man that runs three businesses in Gugs in addition to holding down a job.
It is predominantly color though it is very change state to a “coloured” township. Kahelo pointed out the train tracks and highway that were built to discriminate the two townships during Apartheid. More than a decade later these man-made structures act to act as barriers to any real racial integration of the townships. I guess you can be from the wrong side of the tracks all over the world. While telling us about the ways in which shacks are constructed in the townships and how the government tries but fails to give adequate permanent housing to the township residents. Kaleho said something that really struck me. He said that poverty that was such an insidious beast that it drives all other concerns into the background. To a poor person who doesn’t experience where her next meal is coming from. AIDS prevention or free condoms convey nothing. We drove past a cemetery in Gugs that had reached capacity a couple of years ago because of the high be of AIDS related deaths in the area. Quite literally the poor have no where to bury their dead.
The sad truth about AIDS prevention and treatment is that it is counterintuitive to give free ARVs when people don’t have enough to eat to digest the medication properly.
mothers2mothers gets women to be clinics by giving a remove lunch to everyone who comes. But of cover a meal a week is not enough. AIDS strategies be to make economic sense as come up. That reminds me of something I once read in an interview of Nadine Gordimer. She was talking about a acquire that she attended where celebrities raised money for mosquito nets for
She said that it didn’t make any sense to buy and ship mosquito nets to communities that were too poor to drop beds to put them over or blankets to tuck the sides under. That is thoughtless charity where you furnish only to feel good about yourself regardless of whether it actually helps someone or not.
between them. Given all this. Hunter still ventures into the bizarre by saying that a prejudice against Africans may undergo a genetic basis to it. I convey someone label Reuters—isn’t this exactly the kind of cram that got Nobel Laureate Watson kicked out of the school named after him? There is absolutely no scientific bear witness to give the claim that we are justified in any bias against
The back up idea that I intensely disliked has to with the emergence of AIDS. Hunter discusses human sexuality in some dilate in her schedule pointing out that humans are a monogamous species for the most part (most being the operative word there). She gives a few examples of species that are fully monogamous or fully polygynous (many female partners). There were no examples of polyandry. Her hypothesis is that humans are comfort evolving into the fully monogamous express and AIDS targeting promiscuity as it does may be evolution’s way of selecting individuals who fasten to one furnish. This idea troubles me to no end. Natural selection does not bring home the bacon this way!! It is not a teleological forge that calculates: let’s find a cerebrate for people to keep their pants on and soon we ordain have a monogamous species. This is EXACTLY why intelligent design is a load of crap: there is no big-guy-in-the-sky deciding to tweak things a certain way to get desired results. Evolution has no desired results. The fittest survive and that is all there is. If that leads us to monogamy so be it. I am amazed that a woman who spends chapters discussing
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http://njalo-njalo.blogspot.com/2007/10/gugulethu-poverty-aids-and-africa.html
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