Editorial comment: No, this community has a heart of gold

Date: 09 April 2020 By: Anton van Zyl

“It seems to me that in that town (Louis Trichardt) nothing has changed. No-one wants to see the sun shining on another…”

This is a loose translation of the comment a reader left on the newspaper’s Facebook page last week. He was responding to a photo published depicting a relatively busy main street, amidst the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown period.

Perhaps he was partly correct – the photo showed no empathy for the hundreds of SASSA grantees who had to travel to town to collect their money. Perhaps it did not do justice to the many essential workers who needed to travel into the CBD. But the swipe at the town and its people hit a nerve. This town is not filled with greedy and envious people.

The past week showed up the soul of this community. Every one of us is affected by the lockdown period and we are all very afraid of how an unknown virus may affect us. Still, in between the uncertainty and fear, residents opened up their hearts (and purses) for the ones less privileged.

What started off as a call from one resident to a neighbour, snow-balled into a huge project. Ironically, the person who initiated the idea is not even a long-time resident, only having moved into town a few months ago. His idea was straightforward – let us all just pledge a small bit and eventually it will grow into something big. “If we all pledge R1 000 and we get 80 people, we have R80 000, which we can do a lot with,” he said.

A WhatsApp group was formed, and the first pledges started to come in. A decision was made to rather get the residents to deposit the money into the account of a supermarket store willing to compile food hampers. The R1 000 suddenly became four hampers. No limit was set on the donations. Some gave one hamper, while others promised many more. By Tuesday the group had grown to more than 50 members, with almost R35 000 being pledged. The pledges continued to stream in.

But things did not end there. On Tuesday, the municipality (at last) managed to set up a temporary shelter for the homeless. The municipality apparently tried to move the homeless there last Friday, but the project failed as the people scattered shortly afterwards. One of the reasons seem to be because there was no food. (Not surprising that the homeless did not stay.)

On Tuesday, the municipality tried again and put out a call to members of the community to assist with mattresses, blankets, food items and toiletries. The list was made available to the group of residents who had pledged food hampers, and within minutes the responses started streaming in.

By 17:30 on Tuesday, the municipality’s representatives had collected all the essential items. Bergcare, a non-profit organisation catering for needy families in town, organised the bulk of the mattresses and blankets. Bergcare also assisted with toiletries and food. Members of the local business community arranged for the remainder of the mattresses and blankets and promised to supply the other products still needed. Several individual members promised to assist with whatever is needed.

Probably the most amazing part of all that was happening, is that the “us and them” factor was not present. No colour, culture or religion was involved. No-one asked whether the assistance was meant for “our people” or “their people”, because that did not matter. Much like the coronavirus does not ask whether you are rich or poor, black or white or a South African citizen, the residents who supported the cause did not ask.

So, to get back to the person who made the nasty comment about our town: You have no right to depict us as a group of uncaring and envious people. We are not perfect (in fact, we are probably far from perfect), but when a crisis exists in our midst, we do rise to the occasion.

Only two kinds of people exist, namely good people and bad people, and each group comes in different shapes and sizes, colours and languages. I choose to believe that there are many good people and only a small number of bad people. When I see what happened during the past week in our town, I know that this town has an abundance of good people.

I am proud to be associated with them.

- Anton van Zyl (Manager: Zoutnet Publishers)

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Anton van Zyl

Anton van Zyl has been with the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror since 1990. He graduated from the Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) and obtained a BA Communications degree. He is a founder member of the Association of Independent Publishers.

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