What doesn’t get me excited?

Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.

Every single day gives me excitement. Every single person that I meet and talk to, especially those who are trying to make a living and who are offering something more than just putting out their hands to beg, make me angry, disappointed and excited at the same time.

An example of one of them, is a lady who I met at the robot who was trying to sell a small variety of sewed goods that she, herself had made. The item that I bought from her was a peg bag that you hang on your washing line to store the pegs in.

Her quality of sewing was excellent and without an overlocker, she had turned in the seams and sewn them shut making for a very neat finish to her product. If I had to gauge the time that it must have taken, it possibly was no more than about an hour of work and maybe R10 of material. So a profit of R50 for the peg bag.

But she lived in Johannesburg and had taken a taxi that must have cost R15 – R20 to get to where I met her where she hadn’t sold an item in the 3-4 hours that she had been working her spot.

The bag cost me R60 and after her trip back home, and the time she had spent making and trying to sell her products, if that was the only sale that she made that day then her net profit for spending an excess of 8 hours making and selling, would have come to R10.

I would like to ask anyone out there, if they could afford to live on R10 a day? I know I couldn’t.

I would like you to watch this space because in the next couple of weeks I am going to bring you a story about this lady, and with your help, I am going to turn her life around.

It will be one of the first of many projects that I aim to do.

I am going to leave you with something to ponder and you are welcome to comment on this post in the comment section below. So my question to you is:

If you, the middle and upper classes seriously think that unemployment and crime are major issues in South Africa, what could you suggest as a solution to the problem? What do you think that you could bring to the table to change the current economic and political landscape of this, our beautiful country, South Africa.