When the same girls from your poetry club that spoke a whole lot of sense while reciting The Psalm of Life are now the same ones pushing bellies walking around with proof that they are sexually active teens?
What becomes the point of ever doing anything positive to effect social change when you have experienced such? When you hear 12 year olds budget for beer bottles to drink on new year's day and hear confessions from them that they had beer on Christmas day and plan to switch up on new years?
When you walk back home after midnight from celebrating the end of one year while welcoming another and come across hundreds of teenage boys and girls piss drunk and barely standing on their own yet still drinking and dancing and screaming in naive jubilance.
How crazy would you be to actually get up with the beginning of a new year and start planning new youth development programs knowing fully well that it would make little to no recognisable impact anyways.
Such is the existential crisis I find myself faced with as I suddenly came to a realisation that I may be pushing a rock up the mountain like Sisyphus, only to watch it roll back down again. The process is the same year-in-year-out and when I look back I realise I have not moved much. I have to go downhill and get the rock again and get excited about the prospects of pushing it uphill one more time and hope things end differently this time around.
I guess one can get some satisfaction from recognising that the process is more or less the same for everyone else in their chosen fields of employment. For instance if you are a gatekeeper somewhere and have been for years, when you look back at the contribution you have made for humanity you realise that there was none. You only delayed a few people from getting where they were going to end up anyways. You stopped them for questions and gave them some rules which they may or may not adhere to, much like a school teacher. I'm certain teachers at some point realise the magnitude of their Sisyphian rock especially when they are served at a Super Market or searched at the gate by their former A-student whom they thought had the potential to discover the cure for cancer or possibly rewrite the Bible or use their genius to perfom some other brilliant feat.
I remember how my mother always used to shout in anger everytime I made an excuse about not going to church. She would always say how I was raised the Christian way and needed to continue observing the ways of the lord. And as she got tired of trying and realising I wasn't budging, she would tell me stories of how most grown ups who were raised in the church always remember the power of prayer when they are in trouble; even after having turned against their parents religious teachings and taken up any of the "unsavoury lifestyles" (whether a life of crime or turned into alcoholics or prostitutes). They may stray away, too far away but if their foundation is good and solid...there is still hope for them, she would say.
That got me thinking of my one friend, Thabo who came from a good religious home and was an A-Student in High School but turned to drugs and alcohol when he got to university. His situation got so bad that he even got kicked out of University along with other peers in first year. A few years later he is on his way to attaining a PHD in Physics. He holds a Masters Degree in Physics from the University of Witswaterand while most of the peers he strayed with ended up getting chewed up and spat out by the streets. Thabo had a good solid foundation and as a result, when he got shaken by life, he did not break.
It is such stories that give us hope to get up and do some more for the youth in hope that we at least lay a good enough foundation to offer them support when life happens to them. We cannot hope that they don't attempt to have the fun that their peers are having in their community especially in a community like Pienaar which offers very little alternatives for entertainment for young people.
We look on as the boys and girls we marked and trained as future leaders partake in the very activities that destroy young minds. We listen as they sing along to lyrics of songs meant to dumb them down and make them get excited about a 30% pass mark. We watch and hope that our teachings and lessons offered will at least delay them like that gatekeeper who reads them rules so at least they join the self-destructive party after we have helped them build a stronger self.
Maybe ours is not really to change the society but rather to help the kids we encounter build a stronger amour to withstand the effects of this society. That even as they go through the hormone infused stage of the Romeo and Juliet type of love, they are strong enough to come out intact on the other side. That even as they experiment with the substances meant to destroy their minds, they are at least resilient enough to question it at some point before it is too late.
We give them values that would sustain them long after we are gone and forgotten. Skills that they can always bounce back to when a need arise.
We are indeed pushing the rock of Sisyphus but when I have pushed mine, it really leaves a mark and others will come after and follow that mark as they struggle with their own rocks. This is the rock I have chosen and I will continue pushing it up and down that mountain until one day someone grows up to take it over.
There is hope after all
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