Sitting on the train, I daily see the long-suffering faces of poverty. I often wonder what they had to eat that morning or what they have in their bags for lunch. How many people in the full carriage had jobs and how many were looking for jobs?
The realities that poor people are confronted with daily are ignored. You wake up early to go to work if you have a job.
If you don’t have a job, you wonder how you can get money to pay for food for the day.
If you’ve been unemployed for a long time, you ignore the calls from debt collectors and you wait for the city to arrive to switch off your electricity or curb your water usage. You have no idea what you are going to give your children to eat today. There is nothing.
Your children will leave for school hungry. Your children, exhausted by hunger, won’t arrive at school. They will make their way to a traffic light or city street to beg for money.
After five years of living like this, you are paralysed, having lost all control over your life. Daily hunger and lack have destroyed your sense of dignity and initiative.
You have been to ward councillors and government job opportunities but nothing has broken your state of poverty. No opportunities have emerged to rebuild your and your family’s lives that have been shattered by poverty.
Eventually, you may sell drugs to make a living. Or you rent your property out to others while you move into a wendy-house in your own backyard.
But the people who rented your house stop paying the rent, won’t move out and now you have lost your house and its income. Your poverty deepens.
Traumatic thoughts of succumbing to the demands of using your body and the bodies of your children to gratify the demands of people – for labour or sex – to make money haunt you. You keep getting on the train to go look for work.
In wealthy neighbourhoods, you go around ringing doorbells to ask for food. You get some food and money but on the way home, you get robbed of the proceeds of your labour by others as hungry and as poor as you are.
That night you sleep with a human who pays you for the use of your body. You cry as you grip the R20 in your gown as you give in to them. After they leave, you send your child to the spaza shop with the R20 to buy whatever R20 can buy.
Your child gets robbed of that R20 by the same human who just used you because he knew you would send the child to the spaza shop. The screaming shrieks in your body know no end. You have been fully dehumanised.
You look at your children and think of putting them out of their misery by slowly ending all your lives, to stop this horrible pain you live with. It’s with these thoughts that you eventually fall asleep at 4am.
At 5.30am hunger wakes up everyone. You face this torturous cycle all over again. Your child shows you the homework he didn’t do last night, and the letter from the school you didn’t read.
As you get all three siblings ready for school your body and brain can’t seem to function. There is nothing you are able to comprehend anymore.
You go to the spaza shop to ask for bread that you will pay for when your grant arrives. You are refused more credit because you haven’t paid your outstanding spaza shop debt for two months now.
Your children go to school hungry – again. You make your way to the station and board the train without buying a ticket, hoping that you can make it to your begging destination without being arrested by the security. Poverty has stripped you of everything.
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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