Is alles oraait byrrie hys?

‘’Is alles oraait byrrie hys?’’ is a South African colloquial expression that translates as: “Is everything alright at home?” The reason it’s funny lies in its typical application. For example, if a politician says something strange/ridiculous on Twitter, this phrase might be used as a caption to a photo of the person or a screenshot of the tweet. The suggestion is, of course, that the person is unhappy at home, so is taking out his/her frustrations elsewhere.

But the reason it’s on my mind, this morning, is that I woke up thinking about how the cost of living had skyrocketed, in South Africa, and how increasingly difficult it was to make ends meet. I’ve long accepted that there are very few unique human experiences, and that if one family is going through something, there are probably many others going through the same thing. This is why I believe in sitting down with like-minded people and sharing our stories. In those gatherings, we inevitably find that others have had similar experiences, we feel less ‘’different’’ and start to understand that, if we’ve had similar life experiences, there’s the potential for solutions and healing to be arrived at collectively, which will impact on more people than had we tried to sort things out by ourselves. I strongly believe that the mere act of listening to each other’s story is an important part of the healing process. 

One of the things on my mind, this morning, was how much we share on social media (I’m a Facebook person), yet, at the same time, how much we don’t share. In conversation, recently, someone used the term “Facebook persona’’, and it got me thinking about the difference between who we appear to be, based on our Facebook posts, and who we really are.  Most of us are a lot braver, and possibly funnier, on Fb than in real life. It’s an excellent forum for introverts who have very deep thoughts but seldom share them, to get those thoughts out there. In fact, it’s an excellent forum for introverts, period. Extroverts are out there, living their lives, making new memories, and occasionally dipping into Fb to post fabulous pics and write four words describing their weeks spent climbing some exotic mountain.

But back to what I really want to write about. For most South Africans, alles issie orrait byrrie hyssie. (Everything’s not alright at home.) And the reason is that the cost of living has zoomed past the annual salary increases, extending the hardships of everyday life to a far greater percentage of the population than ever before. I don’t have stats for what I’m saying – this is just my feeling about what’s happening in our country, right now, based on the increase in certain types of conversations around me.

The people worst hit are the unemployed. I can’t even imagine what they go through, what they have to do in order to feed their families, make sure their kids don’t go to bed hungry, pay school fees, and so on. I have no doubt that the petty crime figures are linked to people needing to survive. I’ve heard that the items most stolen by shoplifters are bread and disposable nappies. Nobody should have to be driven to that extreme.

And then we have people who do so-called unskilled work, who earn very little. Whenever I’m in a supermarket, I observe the way different people shop. The more affluent shop with ease, even with leisure – they are loyal to certain brands, they browse, they buy a whole range of things the ordinary person might find extravagant, and they generally don’t check prices. I’m in the category where my brand loyalty is nowhere to be seen, when there’s a sale – my love for a certain brand of chickpeas comes a distinct second to my love for stretching the pennies. They all taste more or less the same, right? 😊

But my heart goes out to people who look poor and clearly have very little to spend, so they’re generally not pushing trolleys, but are putting a few of the most basic items into their baskets, to tide them over to the next time they have to do the same trip, for those same items – bread, eggs, toilet paper, etc. When I see old people shopping, especially on their own, my heart breaks.  

I have what is regarded as a good job, and I earn just a bit more than I was earning in my last teaching post. The reality is that prices of things we consume all the time – petrol, electricity, water, groceries – keep going up, but our salaries essentially stay the same. So, even if you are not an extravagant person, you wear the same clothes year in and year out, things that break in your house have to stay broken, and you’re constantly finding ways to save money, you can still find yourself struggling, because the things that are causing the whole nation hardship are out of our immediate control.

People say, ''Use your vote to make a difference.'' I don’t know, hey. In 1994, we voted the liberation party into power, to make a difference to the lives of the poorest of the poor, but did they? Or did they merely enrich a handful of comrades and do some window dressing, while the majority of shack dwellers, many of whom get raped on the way to the communal toilets, stayed in shacks, stayed unemployed, stayed poor, with very little hope of getting out and very little faith in the ruling party?

My reality – and I imagine it is so for many other people - is that I cannot survive on just my salary. As a sole breadwinner, a single mother without support, I have to take on part-time jobs, to survive. I’ve had one for four years (a weekly restaurant gig) and at the beginning of this year I realised I needed to make more changes, in order to survive the increased cost of living. I decided to stop having my hair dyed (you’d be surprised how expensive that can be) and to go back to teaching guitar lessons.

The former was a simple decision, but the latter was a journey with a couple of unforeseen variables. I had to learn that I’d have to keep tweaking the model until I found the right formula. It’s the fifth month, and I’m still tweaking. My carefully-calculated plan did not work. But it’s an area of my life I am strongly drawn to, and I’m going to get it right - not only is it a potential source of much-needed income, but it’s something that brings me immense joy. I’d hate to have to take on part-time jobs that did not bring me joy. Life is hard enough, and that just sounds too sad.

So what was my actual point? Behind every “’Lol”, smiley face and heart on Fb, are people struggling with day-to-day survival, and most of us are not talking about those things on social media. Some of us have found ourselves dealing with mental or physical illness, as a result of the struggle to survive. For most of us, our anger and frustration come out in how we react to other things that trigger us. 

But what we’re not saying is that we’re not ok. As a South African nation, we’re not ok.  

Is alles oraait byrrie hys?