Look Beyond What You First
See
The HR Doctor had a glorious
experience speaking at the Institute of Municipal Personnel
Practitioners of Southern Africas (IMPSA) annual conference.
This is one of several articles derived from that experience,
and deals with a particularly thought-provoking growth
experience we had immediately after landing in
Cape
Town.
The IMPSA was kind enough to
dispatch a driver and van from the hotel to meet us at the
airport and cart our immense quantity of luggage to the
conference site. We were met by a middle-aged bellhop for our
45-minute drive from the airport. On much of the public right
of way, such as areas along the highway, we saw terrible slum
dwellings without power and often without plumbing. They were
shanties, thrown together with scrap metal and, from the look
of them, barely able to keep from toppling over.
It was poverty on display in
a way which we have never experienced in amazingly fortunate,
if not arrogantly spoiled,
America.
As students and practitioners
of public administration, HR daughter Elyse and I were
exchanging comments with one another and snapping photos. Our
comments were about these terrible conditions in a modern
nation. Our driver joined the conversation very thoughtfully.
He discussed how, in fact, there is a huge amount of poverty
in South
Africa, exacerbated in the
first decade after apartheid by the governments keeping a
fundamental promise it made to the frontline states
bordering South
Africa.
The government promised open
borders. Subsequently, the tens of millions of poor already
making up a large part of the South African population were
joined by many more from other countries seeking and dreaming
about better opportunities. These very poor people were simply
living where they could live and surviving however they could
survive.
Our thoughtful driver became
not only a hotel bellhop but also an important teacher. As we
were speaking about the so-called informal housing, he asked
us to please look beyond what we were seeing. Look 300 yards
beyond and see what is there. We saw hundreds, if not
thousands, of small, perhaps 800-square foot, concrete block
houses with electricity and with plumbing being built as fast
as the South African government could possibly
work.
These houses and the postage
stamp-size lots on which they sat were given to the residents
of the informal shanty dwellings as soon as they were ready.
They were given to them as personal property to do with as
they wished. They could move in and live in the new houses as
most did.
When that happened, the
shanties were bulldozed away. They could develop their own
property and sell it, hopefully at a profit. The point is that
these new houses were clean and were private
property.
This contrasted sharply with
our recollection of the giant tenement apartments which form
public housing and were subsidy-rented to people in
Americas
slums. With the rent and the crowding came feelings of being
temporary.
In contrast, the South
African model was to develop a sense of private property
ownership and pride as part of the overall economic
development of the country and the slow climb out of poverty
for millions of people. True, many of the people receiving
houses chose to stay in the shanties or to move into the new
houses and immediately build an informal housing addition
out back.
It is also true that cleared
shanty zones were often quickly replaced with new shanties as
other migrants entered the countrys urban areas looking for a
place to live.
Look beyond what you first
see was the message from our driver/life philosophy
teacher.
The HR Doctor thought long
and hard about this simple and eloquent admonition from a very
nice man whom we had just met.
Look beyond what you first
see is a lesson we can all learn when it comes to judging
other people or judging other countries. A phrase in the
Talmud that the HR Doctor often cites is find thyself a
teacher. Amazingly our greatest teacher on this trip is the
man who hauled our luggage and our bodies from the airport to
our hotel. That 45-minute drive has left us with a lesson we
will never forget.
All the best,
Phil Rosenberg The HR
Doctor www.hrdr.net
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