There are very few people who humanise helpers and cleaners in SA. Many of us could learn a lot from them.
E.g. I was once interning at this other small finance firm. The lady who cleaned the offices, had just started 3 months ago from some agency. She used to get to work late.

The CEO, a Jewish white woman, asked me to speak to her & find out why that is. The lady could not speak English. Anyway she lived as a backyard shack dweller with one of her children because she had run away from her husband in the EC. She had left the other child with him.

This lady had to wake up early to take the child to creche, which only opens at 7am. Then take a bus from the townships to work and she'd get to work after 9. When I told the CEO. The CEO got her out of the contract with the agency which they paid R300 but paid her R150 a day.

They raised her pay to R500 a day, about R10k pm. That was 2012. On top of that, the firm bought her a house in Phillipi. Took her child to a creche closer to work. Helped her to divorce her husband & get a restraining order from him. She got her second child back from him.

They found a school for the second child in Cape Town and enrolled the lady at a night school. She was in her thirties. Not only did they help her with her current problems, they were making sure her future and her children's will be better. I often think about that situation.

I also know one lady who was a helper for this English ww. She suddenly fell sick. It turned out that she was HIV positive but did not know it. The ww went to see her in Philippi (btw this ww had built her a house both in Philippi and in the EC).

The lady had no food, even though she was receiving her salary. She'd been sending money back home (EC) & had paid a sangoma to treat her. The ww took her to a private hospital&paid for everything. The lady had developed AIDS, had meningitis &pneumonia. Her CD4 was extremely low.

She survived and lived to share this story to me. When I saw her I could not believe it. She looked so healthy and happy. It just goes to show that helping people is literally giving them their lives and humanity back.

There's also this yt gay man who often helped young Black gay men. Some of these men were unemployed for almost a year. I met one that he sent back to college (he ended up failing but that's a story for another day). Plus he didn't sleep with them, a rare thing in the community

Some just needed a place to stay for a month. Some had been kicked out from home. Some were running from their boyfriends. His house always had at least 2 Black gay men. Speaking to the men, I noticed just how socio-economically disadvantaged femme, Black & gay men are in SA.

These young, Black and gay men formed communities of support that extended beyond the urban-rural and ethnic divide thanks to social media which connected them. They often referred each other to systems of support, of which this wm was one of them.

These stories (and I know many more) for me show just how easy it can be to humanise people, especially when you are privileged. It's just that most privileged people choose not to be humane. They choose to exploit further people who are already exploited by the system.

I hope that we start humanising people!