The Road to Namaqualand
Grace and Peace to you …
Last week we heard that unemployment rose to 26.7%. This figure however, does not tell the whole story because it does not include those who have not looked for work within the last month. So the real unemployment figure is more like 37%. This is a national average figure, meaning that some communities have a much higher unemployment rate. The stress and strain for mere survival for millions of people in our land is frightening and making social stability impossible.
Not surprising many people under these conditions turn to micro-lenders for salvation. I remember a few months ago when I was in Paarl seeing a long line of people queuing up outside a micro-lending office every morning. Here the poor and low-income earners pay more for money than the wealthy. So instead of being a means of salvation it becomes a quick route to damning debt.
According to one micro-lender’s website, I can borrow R1 000 for 30 days and repay the loan with R1 288.56 at the end of the month. But if my life ran into a speed bump and I was unable to pay the R288.56 interest at the end of the first month, within four months my interest bill would be up at R1 000, to be paid within 30 days. Imagine buying something and within four months the interest on whatever we bought was equal to what we paid for it!
With the pensioners from the Eastern Cape living in the Sanctuary we have been reminded first hand how some people are treated as invisible, like they do not matter. Marginalised and excluded without fair means to live. I hope this situation among us has prodded our consciences to work for the day when all people have enough to eat and live and flourish.
Last Sunday was Pentecost. Pentecost takes place 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus. 50 is the biblical symbol for Jubilee. Jubilee is the biblical concept of economic justice that includes the redistribution of wealth making sure that those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little. A community that seeks economic fairness is a Pentecostal community. This is what we are called to be.
Grace,
Alan
P.S. If anyone has any contacts with the city to secure public toilets (at least some of them) to be open 24/7 please speak to me. The fact that homeless people have nowhere to go to toilet after 5 p.m. is criminal. This structural criminality turns the homeless into criminals when they are forced to go to the toilet in public.
“The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change;
everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality,
want of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearances nobody follows them,
yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows
it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat. The community cannot get
that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone
so long as the real A is kept sounding.”
~ John Jay Chapman (1862-1933)
