A day without water, and other fun events in South Africa
At the time of writing, it has been 48 hours that most of my town has been without water. I have checked the level of our supply source and at more than 90% full, it's unlikely that a lack of water is the reason for the cut.
Rather, I suspect that years of mismanagement have finally caught up with the municipality, and the Rand Water Board has refused to open the taps on their side until the debt has been paid. The alternative is just as bad - a lack of maintenance that means that the valves feeding the town's water supply aren't working as they should, and the problem has to be fixed first, by unqualified and incompetent workers.
The government officially bemoans the shortage of qualified workers in South Africa, but nobody bothers to tell them that it is their own policies that led to qualified engineers, doctors, and other professionals either taking early retirement packages or accepting job offers in other countries (and not looking back!). As a matter of fact, a recent poll by a local newspaper among senior students revealed that most of those students plan to emigrate from the country as soon as they have their degrees. Some are considering coming back. Others aren't.
As a university graduate in my late 40's, I can relate to them. There is nothing here in South Africa for someone with pale skin and no political connections. And I have been considering leaving this country, myself, for many years now.
However...
Matters are slowly coming to a head. It's not just the corrupt government and its wastefulness that bothers me, but those same people have sucked the life out of our country to the point where it's no longer sustaining its mostly unskilled and semi-literate (thanks to a useless education system) inhabitants. Also, it plays host to millions of legal and illegal immigrants who all need to be served by the dilapidated water, power, and sewerage grids. Pipelines are crumbling and the cables that haven't been stolen (yet) run from and towards power stations that fall apart as well. Roads are in a state of shock and most of the railway lines don't exist anymore. The tracks have literally been stolen and sold off as scrap metal!
Our State-Owned Entities are all bankrupt or as close to it as can be and yet the government leaders get fatter and fatter as their foreign bank accounts get bigger and bigger.
It's 173 days to my flight to Krakow. I've set a countdown timer so that I know when to book my train tickets. (60 days out) It still seems like a long time, but I know from experience that time flies.
The question on my mind is whether I want to return to (a) this country and (b) my soul-sucking government job after the trip is over.
I am seriously looking at a completely wrecked property at a price that I can probably pay from my back pocket if I make my sums right. I can only pray that that specific rotten house on that specific piece of land will still be available by the time I get there six months from now and at that low price. Or - alternatively - that there would be a better option for me to buy.
Yes, I am probably crazy. But it's a sad reflection on my birth country's state that a war-torn country on a distant continent seems to be a safer option for me right now.
I don't want to owe people anything. If I make a break, it'll be a clean one, with all the ends tied up neatly. That means that I will have to come back for a while to properly resign and put my flat up for sale. I don't have much in terms of furniture, but I do have "stuff" that I want to take along, so I'll have to box and crate all that up and store it away until I can move it to its new home.
My cats are another source of stress. The young ginger should not have issues, but Vetkat is old and fat and I don't know if and how she will adjust to a new country at her age. She is still too lively to be put down and getting her adopted will be impossible. So... there's that.