Perspective

It’s official; I am famous! 

Not quite post-a-sex-video-online famous but I’m getting there. This morning, for the first time ever, one of my articles was published and printed in a real newspaper with my name on it. I’ve always gotten so excited when it comes to posting an article on my blog and it says ‘Publish’ but it is one thing to publish unedited words on an online blog just as fifty billion other people do and quite another to have an editor approve your piece, insert it into her newspaper and print it.

This is why I am so excited about this piece. Yes it is only two hundred words and yes it has been stuck in a corner on a pretty obscure page and yes it is only in a campus newspaper but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that for the first time my writing is being approved of by someone I haven’t even met face to face.

This brings me to the article itself and the shocking facts I uncovered while doing the research for it. The article is about MFM 92.6’s 4C community project. MFM is our campus radio station although don’t let anyone hear you calling it that (it is a “community” radio station) and they are currently running a drive to collect cans, clothing and crayons for a community in Khayelitsha. 

And while they are only focusing on a small community the overall community consists of over 400000 people of which 47% are unemployed. That is an enormous amount of people who cannot rely on a monthly income to buy food and clothes and other basic necessities to get them through day to day living. 

And then I started to feel ashamed of myself. Guilty for being well off and believing that being broke is that awkward moment at the end of the month when you’re waiting for payday because you’ve spent all your money on vodka and eating out. Guilty for living in my own self-absorbed bubble where community service is an unspoken word and getting involved means getting drunk on copious amounts of booze and spending the night laughing at jokes that weren’t even funny the first time I heard them. 

Perspective. 

So next time I am doing my little self-important ‘I am famous’ dance I hope that I have the ability to realize that there are children out there who may have raw talent but because their parents aren’t wealthy and because people like me prefer to be sitting in my room when it is raining outside instead of joining the MFM crew in a vegetable garden in Khayelitsha, those kids will never become famous because they have no one to help them shape that talent and mould it into the artistry that it could be.