I live in stereotype suburbia

Posted on March 19th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: Uncategorized.

have a look here

I love it!

5 comments.

On being British

Posted on February 20th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: transnationalism, pressure, bbc, rant, immigration, politics, proudly south african, modern south africa, anger, contradiction, contrast, honesty, modern britain, fear, dignity.

British Citizenship Tests Planned

“In the future… immigrants would have to earn the right to become citizens, by demonstrating a commitment to the British way of life. In practice, this would mean undergoing a probationary period, lasting several years, during which they’d be expected to obey the law, work, pay taxes, pass an English test, and become involved in their local communities, possibly through voluntary work”. BBC Radio 4 news, this morning.

This makes me terribly uneasy, for a number of reasons. To begin with, it amounts to racial discrimination. Only people coming from outside the EU would have to undergo this, meaning that those from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and so on, would have to undergo the process, but people from Eastern Europe not. Furthermore, the implication is that this does not happen at present, whereas in fact immigrants are already net contributers to the national treasury, and in my opinion, do enormously well to fit into what is a pretty culturally confused nation (i.e. British people long ago forgot their own cultural identity, and that had nothing to do with immigration, more to do with a sudden rise in wealth and too much beer.)

Despite my unease, I have ironically often suggested that such a test would be appropriate here in South Africa, and in countries like Spain and Portugal, for potential British immigrants. Whilst not meaning to sound too unpleasant, I have to say I have lived here for a number of years, and met a fair few British idiots. In fairness, many have absorbed some local culture and ideology. Unfortunately that is more often than not a racist culture and ideology, and I often have a sudden need to find a toilet as a means of avoiding conversation with them in social situations. In public, when I hear a British accent, I no longer ask people where they’re from, how long they’ve been here or if they enjoy living here, so fearful am I of the response I will hear.

Imagine if British immigrants to Spain had to pass a Spanish test, or migrants to Cape Town had to demonstrate a basic knowledge of Afrikaans and Xhosa (and a complete ignorance of words and phrases like ‘native’, ‘the Africans’, ‘the locals’, ‘nothing every happens like it should’, ‘our domestic’, or ‘I must introduce you to a little shop I know. They only sell imports, its just lovely’). This is not to say there aren’t some great Brits living here, because truly there are. But my goodness we also have our fair share of utter fools (Mark Thatcher ring any bells?!).

So I have a suggestion. How about we use the excess money generated by the many hard working immigrants to the UK to administer language and citizenship tests, not to them, but to Brits abroad. After all, there are more people leaving Britain than arriving, so in terms of volume those emigrating should be our biggest concern. Perhaps when the results came out, we might learn not to be so harsh on immigrants after all.

0 comments.

a very good article about working as a rural doctor in modern day South Africa

Posted on February 20th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: politics, modern south africa, HIV, dignity, cape town.

can be found here. I strongly suggest you read it.

We went to the launch of the In Our Lives series, newly published by the Treatment Action Campaign at a bookshop in town. It was a truly lovely evening.
Over a drink later, Kat told us about a brilliant South African invention. I’m so proud of South African inventions, we are such a creative nation. This one really tops the bill, go have a look!

0 comments.

Bizarre statement by the Kwazulu-Natal Department of Health

Posted on February 19th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: communication, politics, modern south africa, HIV, what utter bollocks!.

This has just arrived in my inbox from the Treatment Action Campaign. I can’t decide what I’m most horrified by. The fact that a key doctor is being pulled out of a job in a massively under-staffed hospital, the fact that he is being punished for using his initiative to stick to his Hippocratic Oath and to the National Strategic Plan for HIV/Aids, or the absolutely atrocious English!:

TO: ALL MEDIA
DATE: 11 FEBRUARY 2008
EMBARGO: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUBJECT: Disciplinary action against Dr. Collin Pfaff

The Department of Health in KwaZulu-Natal has charged Manguzi Hospital Acting Medical Manager, Dr. Collin Pfaff for misconduct after he allegedly acted beyond his authority in accepting a donation and implemented a Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT) dual therapy to pregnant mothers and newborn babies without prior permission of his superiors.

Further, it is alleged that he sourced funding from outside the department without following procedures as prescribed by the legislation. If true, this is tantamount to misconduct.

With all these allegations reported to the Department, the matter was investigated and a charge for misconduct was laid against Dr. Collin Pfaff.

We have observed that certain opportunistic politicians takes pleasure to use this matter as a political pawn to score points. We will not allow anyone to pull vulturistic theatrics to mystify this matter for their own political gains. We will continue to put the interest of our people first, unlike these opportunists. We will go ahead with the matter following the prescribed legal process to the letter.

Ends

Issued by:
Mr. Leon Mbangwa
General Manager: Corporate Communication
KwaZulu-Natal: Department of Health

0 comments.

Disability… whose disability?

Posted on February 19th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: disability, communication, bbc.

This was a brilliant reflection by Archbishop Rowan Williams on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours program, and I implore you to go and listen. And as an added bonus, here’s the transcript, copied from here.

WILLIAMS
I’ve got what I suppose could be described as a very, very mild minor disability in that I have a completely non-functioning left ear, it’s there purely for decorative purposes. And what strikes me about getting used to living with that, which I’ve had since I was two years old, is I suppose the need to explain an invisible problem to people and to do that in a way that doesn’t immediately put them at a disadvantage. Do you start a conversation at the dinner table by saying incidentally I shan’t be able to hear a word you’re saying, I’m deaf in my left ear? And where do you go from there? But I’m also aware of how it impacts on other things - the fact that in a strange way it helps me sleep better because I only have to put one ear on the pillow and that it also gives me a strain in my neck and shoulders if I’m turning round at an odd angle to listen to people on public occasions. So this very, very small experience is one that sends out tendrils in different directions. It makes me think about invisible disability - what is it that I don’t see that’s likely to be a problem; it makes me think about how something apparently very trivial and very local can actually affect the whole of your body without your quite realising it.

The business of invisible disability and how you explain also makes me think a bit about disability and communication and the fact that quite often people feel, in a very metaphorical sense, disabled when they meet people who have a very visible, very obvious, disability, they don’t know what it’s like and they don’t know what to say. And one of the most common problems, I think, that people feel when they’re introduced, let’s say, to somebody who has cerebral palsy, cases like that, people don’t know how to talk to them. They can be jolly, they can patronising or they can just be dumb and sometimes all of them at once in different degrees.

A friend of mine who has a very severely challenged son, who’s now a young adult, once said that her experience was it wasn’t her child who had learning problems, it was she who had learning problems, she didn’t know how to learn what his life was like. And in a different degree I think that’s something that comes home to anyone who’s had to deal with the question of how to communicate and for me quite a turning point, as when I was a student many years ago and I used to go and work at weekends at a residential home for children with cerebral palsy and the struggle to understand what they were saying and to work out what it was that the uncoordinated movements of the limbs were about always left me feeling utterly powerless, helpless and stupid. And I wonder if that’s not what people are sometimes afraid of. When you’re with people who have real challenges, deep disabilities, you’re left being put in touch with your own vulnerability and your own uselessness, your own lack of omnipotence. And that’s quite hard work. And in a society which really does value being on top of the situation, being cool and powerful and in charge, it’s very threatening and that’s why I think sharing that experience with someone who has real challenges, that’s something that’s actually pretty good for us, for our maturity.

1 comment.

Finally sorting B’s communicator

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: disability, communication, B, honesty, getting it together.

I am at a ‘desperately need to get myself together and get things organised’ point in my life. I struggle greatly to motivate myself to complete the simplest of tasks, and it is making me miserable.

Last year in February, I recorded some simple words and phrases on B’s communicator and made the paper grids with a felt pen, as an interim measure. Last time I checked, interim measures shouldn’t last for a year! But I’ve finally sorted it. Last sunday I went to my neighbour’s house and asked her daughters to record the communicator full of words and phrases that myself and B’s teacher had worked on. (Ideally, B should have been part of this, I know, I’m not following best practise here. But logistics and time just do not allow). And today, after seeing the look of delight on her face yesterday when I handed her a communicator that sounds like she would sound if she could speak properly, I’ve finally got round to making the grids on the computer that her teacher will laminate, using a free trial of a communicator program I found on the internet. It feels great to get stuff done, I really should learn from this sense of satisfaction and complete things on time that I have promised more often.

0 comments.

Happy Valentines Day, you’re going to hell…

Posted on February 14th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: happy, in love, him, not so single any more!.

In fairness, we’ve done pretty well until now. I expected to meet more judgement than I have about R and I’s relationship and the way we decide to conduct it. We do get a lot of racist stares, its true, but until today I hadn’t heard the phrase ‘living in sin’. Imagine my shock, at 7am whilst buying bread, to find myself at the receiving end of a lecture from the corner shop owner. ‘Qur’an or Bible, it all says the same thing’. I thought about retorting with some theological point, something about ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ and what Allah would think about him selling cigarettes, but it was 7am and I really couldn’t be bothered.

Anyway, Happy Valentines everyone. For the last, oooh I don’t know, twelve years maybe, I’ve hated this day, with mutterings of ‘bloody commercial crap’ and an avoidance of going out at all costs. But now that I’ve met my love, I can’t help but enjoy today. Not because I like it necessarily, but because it is nice to realise that every other year on this day I have felt lonely, and today I am not.

So it is that I find myself cooking cannelloni for the first time, looking for recipes for plum tartlets on the internet, making special earrings (picture later, when they’re finished!), and generally just being a girly girl. Bugger it, sometimes I don’t have the energy for being a cynic!

2 comments.

the good guys

Posted on February 11th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: sadness, connections, singledom, communication, happy, anger, contrast, honesty, in love, peace, poem, history, dignity, cape town, him, not so single any more!, america, barack obama.

We wake to good news.
Obama has eleven, Clinton only seven.
It seems the good guys are finally winning.

It is the morning after the night of the spying of the Ghost of Heartbreak Past,
at the end of the prominade.

Shocked to discover the humiliation that remained within,
you distracted me by pointing out the rat community making its rounds of the swimming pool bins.
Big ones and small ones.
Fast ones and slow ones.
We never knew they could jump that high.

Later on, we hold, stroke, caress,
and the pain seeps uncontrollably from my bones.

In the morning, I wake painless,
and hear that Obama has eleven, Clinton only seven.
It seems the good guys are finally winning.

0 comments.

a recent article for my father’s church newsletter

Posted on February 11th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: Uncategorized.

As I’m sure you can imagine, summing up one’s life for public purview is no easy task! I am fearful of saying too much and too little!

I have had an incredibly full, complex and difficult year. It began rather well. I started to settle into my new voluntary positions, and found myself quite surrounded by good friends. That said, I still found daily life incredibly emotionally draining, and towards the middle of the year, after my closest friends had all left the country, I began to struggle greatly. This led to a much needed trip home in October, and to a decision a month or so later to leave South Africa permanently at the end of February this year. But as my father pointed out, the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans! Shortly following this decision, a certain someone entered my life and caused a massive change of heart.

Over the past two and a half years, I have become a vital part of the lives of two very special little girls. For those of you who are not aware of them, myself and my family became involved in caring and providing for a child called Bianca when I first lived in South Africa seven years ago. She is a student at the special school I first worked at, and is in need of a great deal of support outside of the institution she was placed in by the state. She has a friend called Lameez, to whom we have also become very attached. Bianca will turn seventeen this year, and Lameez twelve. These facts horrify me, as I still refer to them as ‘my little girls’! I live around the corner from their home, and provide pretty much daily support. Both girls use wheelchairs, and have speech and intellectual disabilities. And, more importantly, both girls are incredibly rich hearted, beautiful, complex people, who like the rest of us yearn for company, acceptance and security of self. In many ways I have become the closest thing to a mother they have, and whilst this is wonderful, it is also exhausting. Their living circumstances are incredibly distressing, to the point that I rarely take a visitor there who does not leave in tears. But more than distressing, the personal and institutional politics surrounding their care is extremely frustrating, to the point that I often return from a visit screaming the house down, or simply unbearably sad.

Work has also been a strange mixture of satisfaction, frustration and disappointment. Many speak of their time working here as leaving them with a sense of ‘nothing ever happens’, and certainly there has been an element of that for me. On the other hand, the women who I have supported and taught this year are amongst the earth’s greatest and strongest, and I know that their affection for me reflects their appreciation that I recognize those qualities in them. I have learnt an incredible amount about community work and providing support to vulnerable people, and I still have more to learn. But I take great pride that, in a country so divided, my daily life has involved a physical and emotional traversing of those divisions. My beadwork has improved, and I long one day to produce a book documenting the changing face of beadwork in South Africa. My students have made money from the improved skills they have gained from me, which is, ultimately, the point! They haven’t, however, succeeded to the point that I would like them to have. Given the draining and emotionally distressing personal life I have had over the last year, I have found it very difficult to motivate myself at work. Resource constraints, lack of effective staff management systems, and simply too much on my plate, have pushed me into negative patterns of thought and action which I hope to escape in the coming year.

A summary of the year would not be complete without mention of poetry. At a particularly low point in the year, my favourite author introduced me to a poetry evening held weekly in a nearby suburb. It has become, in short, my salvation. Discovering such beautiful words in the midst of such a confusing city is utter bliss, and the friends I have met there are vital to me now. But it wasn’t enough, and, finding myself living alone for some months, I started to battle with an intensity of loneliness I had never know before, and I decided that, combined with the stresses of finances, work and caring for Bianca and Lameez, enough was enough.

Well, like I said, despite having decided to leave, God had other plans. Two weeks after the final decision was made, I was invited to a friend of a friend’s birthday party at a nearby beach/campsite. And it turned out that the ‘friend of a friend’ was a truly wonderful man, the likes of whom I had been hoping to meet for years. We have been together since that day, and very happy indeed. His name is Radesh, he is thirty, an architect, photographer, an incredibly caring person, socially aware, state schooled (this is very important!), and simply beautiful. He has become both my partner and my best friend, and we are enjoying a wonderful, growing, fascinating time together. I couldn’t want for more.

So having said I was the kind of feminist who would never stay in a country ‘just for a man’, there isn’t a hope of me returning home now! The truth is I never wanted to leave South Africa. I was simply tired, defeated and lonely. I have strong, strong roots here. I love the house, my friends, and most crucially my little girls, who I think being separated from may have been more torturous than witnessing their distress.

Having a South African partner enables me to live in South Africa more fully than I was able to before, as it gives me the right to apply for a ‘Relationship Visa’. The crucial difference between any other permit and this one, is that a Relationship Visa involves the rights not only of me the migrant, but also of Radesh who, being a citizen, is guaranteed the right to a family life in the Constitution. I will be able to apply for formal, paid work, and within five years I will be eligible for Permanent Residency. Although I was reticent to apply for a Visa such as this so soon, it is the only way we can stay together and I can build a full life for myself, and he saw no problem with making the application.

The future looks a little uncertain, but very bright indeed. I have applied for a job as a special school teacher, which whilst carrying a pretty atrocious salary, would give me a steady income, and the hours being eight until two would mean I was able to carry on with my beadwork to supplement my income. If I do not get the job, I will continue with my beadwork and make a real success of it personally, as well as continuing with my community work and keeping an eye out for jobs I might apply for. Whilst I love beadwork, it is very isolating and I am not suited to being alone for so much of the week.

I am sad that I will not be visiting this February as I anticipated. Alas the lawyer’s fees for my Visa are the cost of a flight. But I will take the first opportunity I have to visit home this year, perhaps with Radesh. I am, it goes without saying, incredibly grateful to St James for all the help I have been given, both financial and emotional. Without it I wouldn’t have survived here for five minutes. It has enabled me to build a life of which I am proud, traversing the barriers of race, gender and poverty to make meaning and provide assistance in a place which is both desolate and beautiful. I hope that St James can feel a pride in knowing that you have facilitated this.

This latest letter would not be complete without taking the opportunity to say how very saddened I am to hear of Jonathan Hill’s death. What a loss to St James and Leicester as a whole. My thoughts and prayers turn to Jennifer, his sons, and the congregation at this saddest of times.

With love,

Anna

3 comments.

we want change, oh we want change…

Posted on February 10th, 2008 by annanomsa.
Categories: transnationalism, war, sadness, death, rant, politics, anger, contrast, honesty, tired, peace, HIV, history, dignity, link, america, barack obama.

Living with my lovely American roomy, and meeting his wonderfully aware and engaged friends and fiancee, I have remembered the love for and interest in American politics I used to have. Vague memories are coming back from those A-level politics classes now, and I find I understand more than I expect.

I love listening to them talk about the current nomination race. I was eighteen when George Bush came to power, and for the last eight years, conversations with like-minded American friends have featured only incredible levels of despair and shame. But not now. There is an air of hope now. Barack Obama is one of my Flickr contacts, and everyday photos of joyful offices and excited rallies fill my contacts’ photostream. They are offices filled with faces you do not expect to see in American politics. They do not look like party hacks. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor, black, white, asian, you name it, the rallies are so incredibly diverse. And you can smell the hope, truly.

R and I came home last night and watched this video,  because we’d read about it in the papers. And cried. I urge you to watch it.

America, please, we are begging you. I know it is not my nation and that you alone can decide on your president. But please. The whole world is affected by this decision. Forgive my bluntness, but you have screwed up in the last eight years. Left countless millions hopeless and disaffected. Whether it be rice farmers in West Africa, who find themselves out of work because your subsidised products have ruined the market. Whether it be HIV prevention movements in Southern Africa who have naively taken your funding, only to find themselves rendered impotent through your bigoted policies. Or whether it be children in Iraq who have watched their parents die in front of them, who have learnt to associate the words ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ with violence and destruction. The world over we are reeling from the consequences of two elections gone horribly and stupidly wrong.

WE WANT CHANGE.

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