As I look on and observe from an incredibly far distance while the nation’s teachers protest for both liveable wages and decent working conditions, I remember two stories my late Godmother who worked as a nurse in the public healthcare system shared with me growing up.
The first one revolved around how she got to know my mother who would take me to the clinic. The clinic, which was around the Blygezight Gardens neighbourhood, was in desperate need of paint to freshen up its filthy looking walls. She recalled how it was easier for the mothers who were happy to chip in with buckets of paint as opposed to the snail-like approach from the ministry at the time.
Immediately after that story she shared another on how some months it was incredibly difficult to make ends meet particularly after her marital status changed. As she spoke with both pride and sadness she recalled how, at the same clinic, she would sometimes put out a jar of sugar cakes that she had made. Sugar cakes because the ingredients were the only ones she had to spare at home at the end of the month. At the end of most clinic visits, many mothers left what she called ‘a fine change’, which would then help her slide over into the next month.
To speak of stories like these, so many would be smothered in shame but never my Nursey, the name I called her from the time I was a little girl until her final days on the living side. Like almost everything she did and said, there were lessons to be learned and serious reflections she was inviting me to have.
Nursey was fully aware that our worlds were different and that both my privileged childhood and neighbourhood would keep me partitioned off from inequality. She was aware that in my safe alternate reality, I, like many others, was barred from interrogating people’s circumstances and the systems that allow for them. Nursey wasn’t try to show off her resilience (something she ought to never have to do), but rather how so many public servants, especially those who work as nurses and teachers, are forced to survive and suffer. Moreover, how so many of us are conditioned to see them as special workers with care characteristics that allow for total ignorance when it comes to their social and financial needs and requirements; as if their care characteristics can pay the bills.
In the current circumstances, teachers must also face the snide comments, the paycheck scrutiny and analysis, the open threats to both block and cut the salaries of those who dare to engage in their democratic right to protest. These are just a few examples of how so many of us have been removed from what our neighbours’ realities are.
When Nursey shared her stories there were three things that stood out to me the most. The first one being, while I’m sure the intentions were good, the paint that those mothers provided back in the day probably placed the healthcare workers who were stationed there in an awkward position and provided a weird power imbalance, even if they weren’t fully conscious of it. The second was that I wondered about those clinics in areas where mothers didn’t have the same resources and how those working environs influenced the care citizens received there.
The third thing I worried about was the informal gig economy (which still exists today) that so many public servants participate in. Whether it’s the after-school lessons, or the sugar cake jar like my godmother, even after they have poured years of training into preparing and studying to care for and educate the nation’s citizens and children respectively. One can only imagine the additional physical and emotional toll they endure to maintain being in their jobs.
So many of us look at the glossy private hospitals springing up all over, and continuous expansion of the hefty priced private schools and shout development. But is it really development when well over half of the country’s population couldn’t even dream of retaining their services?
Real development is when our public systems are superior to private ones and are accessible to all citizens across the board. Real sustainable development is when we are not dependent on random acts of kindness to sustain any moving parts in a public system but rather a robust taxation system coupled with a fully functioning local government system. Real development is when workers attached to our public systems can perform their jobs without jumping through hoops to survive. If it’s one thing these protests must teach us, it is how far removed so many of us have become from each other’s reality. Such growing inequalities will affect citizens in the long term both directly and indirectly.
