What protects your heart?

What protects your heart? Is it stability in life, love and family? Is it confidence in the work place or the understanding that regardless of how bad your day may be, at the end there will always be a healthy dinner on your plate, a secure roof over your head and a warm bed calling your name? Is it the realization that healthy or sick an educated physician is merely a phone call away and medical attention accessible day or night? Or the knowledge that with the wealth of education you received options for employment and advancement are endless?

Take away stability. Remove confidence and understanding. Evaporate the table of food, well constructed roof and warm bed. Eliminate access to medical professionals, confiscate necessary medicine and delete the option for education.

Forget about viable transportation or a reliable income, for those never existed within your possession. Add a lifetime of suppression, depression and disappointment. Add a generation of death and disease pillaging your community, your neighbors, and your home. And to top it off add a current debilitating strike which closes the doors to all schools, clinics and hospitals.

Welcome to South Africa. Welcome to the recent harsh reality of the children my roommates want to be teaching, the patients I care for and want to aid in obtaining their necessary medicine. Welcome to the closed doors at hospitals, the locked gates at clinics and the vacant classrooms in both government and some private schools. Welcome to frustration, hindrance, and heartbreak.

South African public servants have been on official strike for a week and a half; unofficially striking for two plus. Teachers, nurses, janitors and orderlies have left their stations and headed outside to toy toy, dance and chant in hope of a higher pay raise. They have only re-entered to harass, intimidate and forcibly remove others from their posts.

The nationwide strike has paralyzed the world in which I live. The unions are demanding an 8.6 percent payment increase and a 1000 Rand – around $137 USD per month housing allowance increase. They are threatening a secondary strike including all taxi drivers and other public workers if demands are not met. I understand that the union members are using their working abilities as leverage because it is all they have, but it hurts me to see that those most affected by the strike are children and the sick.

My roommates whose classroom lays dark sit at home day after day unable to even privately tutor students for fear of attacks. The children who would be attending school sit at home, empty bellied because their largest and often times only meal is one that is provided on the school grounds at lunch. My clinic is still functioning which is a blessing for the 22 patients admitted. They have a bed and care, but my patients along with all of those who are sick at home are unable to go to clinics to receive pertinent treatment.

Patients are being discharged too early because there is not enough staff to care for them. Those with AIDS who depend on their regularly scheduled appointments at ARV (Anti Retro Viral – AIDS medicine) collection sites to obtain medicine imperative to their survival are being turned away. Individuals with Tuberculosis are being sent home. They are carrying with them the great risk of obtaining multi drug resistant strains of their disease, instead of the medicine that can restore them to health; effortlessly exposing countless others.

The strike infuriates me. I’m annoyed that day after day I can’t do my work as regularly scheduled. I’m troubled by the lack of responsibility on behalf of President Zuma. I am bitter, pissed, annoyed, stressed and sad. I hate that people will die because of this.

As the unrest and cacophony of the strike surround me I think about what protects my heart. Although the stability and confidence I have help, it’s not them. It’s not the food or shelter, the medicine or knowledge. It’s the unspoken love I am surrounded with even in times of annoyance. It’s the dedication and strength in the eyes of my patients even when their appointments are cancelled. Its being able to have faith in something bigger than myself and my feelings.
What protects your heart?