Fire Season in this area of South Africa, it’s either the rainy season or it’s fire season. Fires take on a whole other meaning for the millions in the Western Cape who live cheek-by-jowl in in the “informal settlements.” These neighborhoods are sprawling areas of corrugated steel shacks (4 walls and a roof) on sandy ground with no running water or sewers — and sometimes, no electricity. Cooking is done over an open fire. The residents are jammed in so tight that if a fire gets out of hand, several shacks can be burned in a minute.
It’s also the windy season, fanning any flame. When we attended All Saints Church, they announced that such a fire had destroyed all the possessions of dozens of people, and a special collection was being made to help. The government might give the survivors “sheets” of corrugated steel to rebuild their shacks, leaving it up to the Anglicans and others to provide the other necessities of life. For example, in South Africa, if you don’t have a school uniform, you don’t attend school, so uniforms were part of the assistance. The Diocese of False Bay includes more than a million people living in these “informal settlements.” This country has the greatest inequality in the world. That’s a daily challenge.
Load Shedding – There’s an App for That
No, “Load Shedding” is not a new diet fad; it’s the electric grid shutting down for a couple hours at a time. The electric utility, Eskom, is unable to meet demand a lot of the time. Often, sometimes twice a day (!), the electricity goes off– in the most industrialized nation in all of Africa. It ought to be better than this.
Eskom helps with tweets and a load-shedding app to tell you that a blackout is coming. Mismanagement and corruption have led to low capacity and high utility debt, so repairs and new power-generation facilities are slow in coming. Consequently, schools and businesses have to close, refrigerators and other appliances are strained, and the economy suffers.
Saturday night, the power was out between 8 and 10:30 PM (!). We watched the parking attendant at the restaurant across the street take off his safety vest and head for home because the restaurant closed (no cooking). The wait staff didn’t get their pay and usual tips. And the parking attendant – working only for tips– got nothing. So load shedding means no money for a guy with no other job. Industrial production disruptions, unpaid workers, and a national debt closer to junk bond status, all because of unreliable electricity. Just one more thing to deal with in addition to all the other problems life throws at you. Of course, the poor have it hardest. At least in the informal settlements (shacks) they don’t turn of the electricity. The loss of streetlights would enable greater crime and violence than the severe levels they have already. Candlelight dinners are nice, but not this way.
What we’re actually doing in South Africa
This is a picture of a bit of Visual Basic code (It doesn’t look too basic for me!). This is a program written to assist the Diocesan Office track the leave requests of the priests and office staff. Previously, they circulated a sheet of paper to collect signatures, and Diocese staff tallied leave in a notebook by hand. We still have the leave request paper, but the data are now processed in an Excel Worksheet with the click of a button.
This and other pieces of code do the work of recording, adding and subtracting, and remembering. The newest version creates a new year (they start their year in February!), and cleans out last year’s entries. Additional priests and retirements are also handled by clicking a button on the screen.
Volunteering in church work can take on many forms depending on your gifts. We’re not building or teaching or preaching in our thick American accents or “working in the garden” (a phrase they use here that may mean something else). Instead, we provide office automation and a simplified form of management consulting for the Diocese and our Methodist colleagues. We can’t decide what actions they need to take, but for people trained in theology and psychology, we can teach them fundraising writing forms and a type of structured decision making that leads to better alternatives and, hopefully better outcomes. Besides, we didn’t bring any gardening clothes with us, and the sizes here are all in metric!
