My favourite bus experience

I was chatting to some friends the other day about bus experiences. If you've ever travelled long distance on a bus I'm sure you can imagine how the conversation went: fried chicken, dubious men, ablution horrors and so on.

My slightly shameful confession is that in spite of it all (and there is a lot to be in spite of!), I actually quite like traveling on the bus. Its the unsanitised version of life, you know? Where you are forced to interact with people you would never have interacted with otherwise, deal with situations you would never have had to deal with other wise.

So with that in mind, let me share with you my favorite bus story of all time. Remarkably, I have had a few really great bus experiences. But this was the best:

In East London you can board the bus in two places that I know of: The Windmill and the Station. Now let me just not beat about the bush so I can paint the picture for you: white people do not board the bus at the Station. White people board the bus at The Windmill. The station is in the middle of town, noisy bustlely, street vendors and so forth.

Ok. So keep that picture in your mind. Now if I remember correctly, the bus picks people up at The Windmill first, then at the station. So if you board at The Windmill, which white people do, you then bus to the Station where you wait about another hundred years for people to board at the Station before you finally leave town to go where you are going.

So after many bus trips I decided I was over the hundred hour wait at the Station. So I booked a ticket from the Station. All fine and dandy till I realise this means my mom and gran will have to drop me off at the Station. Oh well, its all fine, I get dropped off at the Station. Things are going fine except for me somehow being bustled to the end of the queue a few times and my mom exhorting me to push otherwise I'll never get on the bus.

There is one other scruffy looking white man waiting to board the bus. While my mom is waiting for me to elbow my way through the luggage queue (I hate elbowing, but I was getting further and further *away* from the bus as the throngs of people elbowed in front of me), this man sidles up to my mom and says,
"Don't worry about your daughter 'mam. I have a gun."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So as soon as I manage to extracate myself from the luggage throng to join the getting onto the bus throng, my mother pulls me aside and whispers "Don't sit anywhere near that man!"

Like I was going to!

Hehe.

Anyway, that was my all time favourite bus experience.

Supremacy makes you stupid

Supremacy makes you stupid.

(Just putting it out there!)

Fighting for the chance to listen

Lord, grant that I may seek rather
to understand, than to be understood;

(from the Prayer of St Francis)

I was in the States for a bit last year, in a smallish city called Urbana-Champaign. They have local TV stations there, and there was one particular TV stations that was just for that city, where they had city wide notices and ads and so forth. Similar to our local radio stations in some ways, I suppose.

One of the things they aired was what appeared to be town council meetings. Oh my actual goodness. Those things were boring. They would go on for hours and hours and the format would be something like this:

Public meeting about a problem with parking demarcation in the city centre.
Council/Committee thing of about 6-8 people preside over the meeting, which is open to the public. They are seated at a head table and there is a central mike open to the floor, which people take turns at.
Events as follows:

Mr Smith (at open mike): Hello, I am Mr Smith, owner of the stationary store. I believe that changing parking rates in my area will negtively affect my business which is primarily from blah blah blah...... (5 minutes pass)
Mr Council Member 1: Thank you Mr Smith.
Mr Hewlett (at open mike): Good morning, I am Mr Hewlett from the traffic department. Let me explain our plan to rezone the parking areas. There will now be two classes of parking, for the inner city and outer city areas. This was motivated by the desire to cut down on traffic congestion in the very inner city. The price of the new inner city parking will be... blah blah blah... the inner city zone will span from Tulip Street in the East to Henry Street in the West... blah blah blah blah.
Mr Council Member 1: Thank you Mr Hewlett for explaining that to us. Will the new zoning plans be available for public scrutiny?
Mr Hewlett (at open mike): Yes sir, they are available at the traffic offices in Brown Street.
Mr Council Member 1: Good. Who is next?
Mrs Ramsey (at open mike): Good morning Mr Council Member 1.
Mr Council Member 1: Good morning Mrs Ramsey, good to see you today.
Mrs Ramsey (at open mike): Thank you Mr Council Member 1. Mr Council Member, I am here to speak for the Greaves Old Age Home association. As you know, our home is situated on the corner of Fourth and Elm street, on the edge of the new inner city, higher price parking zone. We request that the council require the traffic department to move the inner parking zone to the other size of Honeysuckle street so that we are not effected by the higher parking traffic. We are all pensioners, as you know, and the higher price will effect us particularly harshly. The few of us who have cars really have no other place to park them than in the Elm Street parking bays, and our guests would also be effected by the new prices. The option of parking the few streets away in Henry Street is really not viable for many of our old people, the walk is not short and safety is also a consideration in the evening... blah blah blah....
Mr Council Member 1: Thank you Mrs Ramsey, we will take that into account.
Mr Council Member 2: Yes fellow council members and public, I want to add my support to that point. The issue of safety really is an important one.
Mr Gariep (at open mike): Good morning everyone. I would just like to put in my support for the rezoning. I run my IT business from offices in the inner zone and I welcome any plans to sort out the traffic problem in our area. Our customers often have to park several blocks away and I'm sure that this negatively effects my business... I feel that the increase in parking fees is quite nominal, and will hopefully only serve to encourage the many shop employees from our area to make use of the parking lots in the outer city zone rather than parking in our streets and making it difficult for customers to find parking... blah blah blah...
Mr Council Member 1: Thank you Mr Gariep. Which is your business?
Mr Gariep (at open mike): I run Gariep IT Consulting on Frere Street Mr Council Member 1.
Mr Council Member 1: Thank you. Mrs Hill, I see you will be adressing us next. Are you addressing us on behalf of the Brooke High School governing body?
Mrs Hill (at open mike): Yes I am Mr Council Member 1...
... meeting goes on and on and on and more people have their turn to speak...
(Completely made up, but representing the real meetings!)

Woah. Man this stuff was BORING. Boring. Unbelievably boring. It was so boring it made me curious and I watched an hour here and there. There was the one about parking rezoning (simulated above!). Another about plumbing problems on some pavements and who should be held responsible to pay. Another about some sortof rent-though-food stamps scheme and home owners objections to it.

And everyone in the world had the opportunity to speak. Little old ladies, men in suits, officials, residents, angry pro-poor people who accuse house rentors or being evil, lawyers, house owners who go into great boring detail about the intricacies of lease clauses. Articulate people, rambling people, concise people, irritated people, knowledgable people, angry people, poor people, middle class people, old people...

Sheesh.

And those councillors just sat and listened and listened and listened. Occasionally they might speak amongst themselves or address a member of the public who was speaking, either to add their opinion or to note something or ask something...

Now I'm not sure how their local government systems work there, but presumably at the end of it all the council weighs up what was said and them makes their decisions or rulings or whatever.


Wow. Imagine living in a society where our leaders listened to us. Where we felt there was a platform to make ourselves heard. On any issue, big or small. Imagine a society where we politely listen to people we completely disagree with, even if they are long winded and emotional, or inarticulate, or unimportant members of society. And then we consider what they have said.

And moreover, we welcome their chance to address us. We don't only want to hear from the people we agree with. Or the people who support us. We want everyone to be given a chance to have their say. And for that ideal we are willing to endure incredibly long, incredibly boring meetings.

We also don't only want the chance to speak. We also want to chance to listen. We welcome the chance to listen. Just like we fight for our right to be heard, we also fight for our opportunity to hear.

That is democracy working.

Vision, Voices and Hope

Listening

On Tuesday I went to an event called: "Voices, Visions and Hopes of our Youth. What's missing in our new democracy."

It's a UCT Humanities Faculty initiative, where public figures have conversations with South African youth. This was the first one, and the conversers were five high school pupils and three adult panelists.
The panelists were Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Dr Alex Boraine and Finance Minister Mr Trevor Manuel (from left to right in the photo above). Some illustrious panelists!
I won't put the names of the scholars, because they are not public figures so perhaps they would not like to have their names in the public domain on my blog, but they ranged from Grade 10 to Grade 12 and came from Alexander Sinton High School, Tafelsig High School, Rustenburg High School, Durban Girls College and Uxolo High School.

It really was a lot of fun and the content was so thought provoking. The five scholars began presenting what they each thought was the biggest problem for South Africa's youth. Then the panelists each responded, then there was a bit of back and forth where the scholars and audience could ask questions to the panelists and the panelists could also respond to each other.

There were a couple of things that made the format particularly great. The fact that the scholars began things, and the panelists had to listen to them and then respond to them, was fantastic. Dr Boraine actually commented on what a good statement that was making, that they had to listen first. And when Mr Manuel's turn came to speak he told the scholars that he was now getting his turn to speak to power :)

It was also good to have the scholars just present what they thought of as problems. They started off quite timid but as they were encouraged by the audience and the MC they became bolder - you should have heard the last girl criticise Julius Malema and the ANC! The first girl shope about racism, the second guy about lack of facilities at his school, the third about abuse of girls and rape, the forth girl about apathy and the final girl about lack of leadership to inspire young people.

Then the panelists responded and raised so many interesting issues. And the back and forth between panelists and scholars and audience was fantastic, because it really was a conversation. Not just listening to some important person making a speech.

I wrote a short article about the event for my student newspaper but it was *so* difficult because so many interesing issues were discussed...

Some of them were racism, corruption, BEE, education, the media, breaking the cycle of poverty, changing people's attitudes to grants (very interesting!), living in a democracy, responsibility, Julius Malema (wow that guy made himself newsworthy!) ...
So interesting!

Maybe I will write a couple of followup posts about what was said. Probably the main theme running through it all was started by the scholar who said that apathy is a problem because democracy requires citizen participation to work. Trevor Manuel picked this up in his response and spoke about the fact that ultimately all people have to take responsability for their own lives, and that democracy is a social compact between the government and people, and citizens have to take up the responsability of making it work, along with government. And how in many ways the problems we have in making our society work are problems of individual values. Our education system, for example, is extremely well funded. But things fall down in schools where many of teachers have no work ethic...

I could go on - the discussion about social grants was so interesting too!

But let me stop there.

Suffice it to say that is was really a remarkable event. Maybe one day Rhodes will consider doing them too.

Let me just end with my favourite moment from the event: A journalist had just adjusted the mike in front of Trevor Manuel, when Mr Manuel moaned about the media, describing them as (to quote!) "low quality sensationalist clap trap."
!!!

Ah but I sympathise with his sentiments!

For concerned citizens and patriots

I read about this AZAPO Symposium in the City Press yesterday. I hoped it would be in Cape Town because I am going to be there next week, but I emailed the organisers and alas it will be in Joburg.

So if anyone from Joburg is interested, please go and report back to me!

I would really love to hear Barney Pityana speak because I have read some good things by him and about him, and he is someone whose opinion I am very interested to hear. I also want to know more about AZAPO and what they stand for. And I'm a concerned citizens and and a patriot :)

The organisers also emailed me a map which I can forward to anyone who would like directions.