BY Fr OSKAR WERMTER SJ There are two decisions young people have to make in life: finding the right partner to marry and deciding on the right vocation (trade). This is a big struggle. In former times you would follow in your father’s footsteps. If your father was a farmer, you would inherit the family farm and end up growing crops and breeding cattle. And a daughter of a medical doctor tended to pursue the same profession. When I was living on a mine, we had a different situation. The parents, mostly engaged in manual work at a copper mine, but wanted their sons to do administration jobs (office work). Being a manual worker, the father wanted his sons to be clerks, he did not want them to get their hands dirty using shovels and picks in dangerous underground jobs. When the boys at a mine were offered apprenticeships to qualify as miners, a mother I spoke to was appalled. She wanted her son to sit in an office, in a white shirt and tie. I told her that as a qualified miner he would get the wages which were several times as much as he could get as a mabharani (clerk), or a “mine boy” pushing a wheelbarrow. With such a pay, a boy would have little trouble paying lobola (bride price). Nowadays you cannot be choosy. Anything to put sadza (staple diet) on the table is okay. Is a white-collar job necessarily paying better than manual work? What is offered on the labour market? What qualifications are needed? A householder may run around looking for a plumber. But the children of his more educated neighbour have degrees in political science. Electricians may be hard to come by. But there are plenty of young women with qualifications in financial administration. Are you sure you train for a job for which there is a market? Are you seeking work or employment? Maybe you could make a living by creating your own employment rather than looking for employers. The young ones have no work. Really? Roads are in an appalling state and potholes are a danger to the driving public and traffic in general. It is not only during a pandemic that children have no teachers and remain half literate. They are neglected, live in cardboard boxes and sniff glue. The chronically ill cannot access medical care. Accident victims find no one in a hospital’s out-patients department to give them first aid. Parents have spent lots of money on school fees to teach their children reading and writing. But can they read, can they write, except with their smartphones? Who gives them an interest in books, how will they gain useful knowledge and become self-supporting handymen? Elder brothers and sisters could learn a lot by teaching the young ones in the family. Would that not help build a self-help culture? In such a culture, nobody has a right to be idle with the excuse: “This we did not learn in school”. So why not train women and girls? We need a new self-help culture and a technical civilisation based on family and community cooperation. Women always complain that they are never given a chance to prove themselves. Women need not be restricted to women’s wo
