A rendezvous with Alex (Township)
The end of June I celebrated my 21st, I see no real point in having a huge party everyone getting absolutely fall down drunk, feeding you shots because it’s your birthday and you don’t need to remember it the next day…
So I decided to have a quite dinner on the night of my birthday with my fiancé, my besty and my neighbour, after trying out oysters and waiting 2 hours to get a drink we decided we would be better off going elsewhere for some food, we landed up at a cute tai restaurant (no names to be mentioned) we got our food and it was lovely!! Except of course for the uncooked prawns that gave me a lovely case of food poisoning. I spent most of my birthday sitting next to a toilet bowl. I was not ready to give up just yet! I decided I would have a small get together with a few mates at Manhattans night club 2 days later, which was fantastic, I danced until I couldn’t breath, drank enough to have fun but stopped before the toilet bowl would become my companion for the night AGAIN and left before my feet got sore.
Getting to the point. My fiancé is a reservist and my besty is a bleeding heart (rescuing animals from townships, the SPCA, anywhere she can find them really) point still coming…
They both decided that we should take a ride through Alex at 3 in the morning whilst they both told me horror stories of people shooting at police cars whilst they patrol for no apparent reason, how the dogs are treated, how people have to live etc. The smell was atrocious, the rats where the size of small dogs and we had no problems finding them either! I am not going to lie- this was a terrifying yet crazy experience – unreal almost, I mean I live in an area that has a township down the road and another one over the hill and I drive past them every day, and you look at the kids playing soccer and the taxi drivers parked and bobbing to their hip hop beats, and on Saturday night there is always a party! I can’t sleep anymore if there isn’t blaring music coming from the township, vuvuzelas being blown like the world is about to end. My point? I guess it made me think. I get really bleak with life when it’s the 20th of the month and I just can’t afford to go out for some sushi and a few cocktails with the girls, I see the negative more often that I see the positive, yet these people living in the townships who don’t have/ can’t afford some of the “luxuries” that I would call necessities, still see the positive, still dance the night away and find joy in what they do have, it’s time to stop being disappointed with what I don’t have and start enjoying the things I do have.
It’s funny how the fortunate usually only concentrate on what they don’t have instead of appreciating what they have. I’ve also seen the concious reality of life, sitting by my desk, staring outside and observing how happy and fulfiled a delivery guy would be on foot delivering lunch…knowing that he’s just glad that unlike some of his peers that sit around in the hood doing nothing but cause trouble, he has a job that sees him take bread, milk and maize meal at home every night for his pregnant wife and 2 yr old daughter. At that point you relish the fact that you are seated in a nice office, 3 flat screens infront of you, a phone, and internet at your disposal and forget that little issue you had.
Let’s live for now and not the future…for what we do now determines how the future unfolds.