One of the dilemmas everyone associated with charity continually confronts is that there are so many impoverished people, it becomes difficult to know where to start or what to do to assist.
The simple answer for me is - rather than be overwhelmed by the numbers and do nothing - surely it is better to focus on the one or more people you can directly help?
At least this way you are making a difference in someone’s life - as opposed to helping absolutely no one. Just a thought.
With the advent of the internet a number of new occupations announced their arrival.
Website designers, social-media marketers, electronic publishers - for the first time in ages a host of new professions appeared in the world of employment.
But other occupations that certainly didn’t exist when I was growing up, and which have nothing to do with the internet or IT, also appeared. One is car guarding.
“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, self-employed car guards began to expand into sporting events, concerts, suburbs and other venues on an ad hoc basis. Due to the fact the job requires little overhead cost, this employment opportunity draws many of the 16% of South Africans employed in the informal sector” - Wikipedia.
So what is “car guarding?”
It is the science of (while making yourself as difficult to be seen as possible by standing behind the car you are directing), teaching people who have been driving for a very long time how to get into a vacant parking spot. You then disappear until the exact moment the driver returns to reclaim their vehicle and you teach them how to reverse, turn, and exit the car park. With a sycophantic look on your face.
You also spend a lot of time harassing ladies pushing trolleys filled with groceries.
Of all the categories of “Street People” one can come up with - for me the two most irritating are car guards and windscreen washers. When I turn into an almost empty car-park and find a guy in a Day-Glo yellow jacket greeting me, then directing me into a parking spot, which is in the middle of five other empty parking bays, I suspect he is just taking the mickey.
When later he demonstrates how I should be turning the steering wheel to get out, I know he is.
That aside, I thought I might as well have a chat to one or two of them and find out what their story is.
On the corner of 12th street and 4th Avenue in Parkhurst, Solly Ntlangeli (44) from Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape, guards cars. His father died when he was just 10 and later, through various family connections, Solly ended up living in Carletonville. There he worked for Anglo American for a while. Later he moved to Johannesburg, where he worked as a general labourer on a number of building sites.
I ask him if he specialised in anything.
“Yes - I am a painter." With that he hands me a simple little pamphlet which has his name and telephone number on it (082 485 2691).
“Do you get many jobs from these leaflets?” I ask him.
“Sometimes I do,” he says, “but at the moment there are too few painting jobs.”
“Do you have all the equipment you need to be a painter?”
“Yes. I have the brushes and stuff oh, and a ladder. I just need the person who employs me to buy the paint.”
We then get to my pet topic of car guarding. Solly began this career when work on the building sites dried up.
“We were very busy in construction for a long time,” he says, shaking his head, “but then the work just became less and less. So I came here and I registered with the association (homeowners?) to be a guard.
“So now it is what I do. Also while I’m doing this I give out my phone number to see if I can get painting jobs. I also wash cars. Usually for a normal size car,” and he points at a parked vehicle on the other side of the road, “I charge R50 to wash it.”
“How many,” I ask, “do you get on a good day?”
“Maybe three, or sometimes even up to five. But then other days there is nothing.”
Solly has been staying in the Immaculate Hall in Bramley, near Alexandria for the past four years - for which he pays R750pm.
He calls it, “a shelter”. Apparently at night the women stay on one side of the hall and the men on the other. He also has three daughters and three sons who live there; the oldest is 24. They get fed by the Hall in the evening and he says even though there are around a 100 or more people, they always get food.
He works every day except Sunday; when, if he is not too tired, he goes to church.
His greatest wish, it seems, is to make enough money to take his family back down to Humansdorp to visit relatives.
I ask him if he finds people get irritated when he starts directing them. He thinks for a minute. Before he can answer I say it doesn’t matter because I can see he doesn’t understand the point I’m making. He does offer though, that the people in the area are very nice to him and rarely don’t tip him.
“How do you react when they don’t give you anything?,” I ask.
“I just smile and tell them, ‘next time',” he says with a smile.
Later I meet Bongani Nkwanyane in Keyes Avenue in Lower Rosebank. He is from Newcastle in KZN where he worked for a supermarket “like Pick * Pay” he says by way of explanation.
Inevitably, though, he came up to Johannesburg to look for work. He doesn’t elucidate - but I gather the job he was doing, ended.
He stays in Illovo with his girlfriend who is a domestic worker. He has two children who stay with family in KZN and the oldest is 16.
He has been a guard for five years.
“Do you also wash cars?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, nodding. “I also clean cars at the police station,” and he points back down the road.
Like Solly, he charges R50 a car-wash, and can also get as many as five on a good day.
Again, he also works six days a week and takes Sundays off. It is obviously a car-guard thing to take Sunday off.
When he gets up in the morning, he rarely eats, but has coffee. Sometimes he has a vetkoek. At lunch time, depending on finances, he buys pap from a tuck shop down the road. In the evening he eats with his girlfriend; again usually pap, but with stew.
Both these car guards say they never have a problem with people trying to break into vehicles, so it seems that just their presence is a deterrent.
Something suburban car guards don’t appear to have to contend with is a “bay fee” - the daily cost a car guard must pay to agencies or managers of shopping malls to secure a certain patch. This varies from R20 to as much as R50 a day.
The Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority has called for the formalisation of car guards to protect them from exploitation, and to also ensure they get appropriate training - although most car guards probably cannot afford the training or registration fees.
As much as they can be irritating, I find the minute I raise the subject of car guards almost everyone seems to have a favourite.
But I have yet to find anyone who has a favourite windscreen washer.
The Juggler: With four other jugglers, Khutlang entertained the cyclists at the start of the Telkom 94.7 Cycle Challenge.
Hunchback: Zorao couldn’t stop smiling when I stopped for a quick chat. “Hey Baba,” he said, “you helped me too much - people give me lots of money,” and he patted me affectionately.
The Bagman: He says he has had a number of piece jobs (gardening), but nothing permanent. A friend of mine, Resh, says he was so touched when he read how David takes an apple home and shares it with his wife that he (Resh) has bought him a Christmas hamper. He just needs to deliver it.