While You Slept

As you are going to sleep at night, do you think about where your family is? Are they safe? What about your belongings? Have you secured the house? Car? Work? Let's take this to an even deeper level. Do you ever think that while you are sleeping there is someone on the other side of the world just beginning their day? As you lay your head down, someone else is picking theirs up and getting ready to go to work in a factory, as a taxi driver, or beggar. It is interesting to think that the world goes on without you in it, isn't it?

On Wednesday night as Cape Town slept and Chicago began to leave work for the evening, someone, most likely a group of people, wreaked havoc on an already struggling NGO. I walking in to work at Ilitha Labantu Thursday morning to find the front desk split in three pieces, doors off hinges, closets emptied of their contents which was strewn across the floors and all fifteen desk tops and the information they held, gone. As you walked around the building you were surrounded by needless destruction everywhere you looked. This came just one week after another break in where only two desk top computers had been stolen. It is unknown if the destruction was purposeless or if it was some sort of retaliation from an abusive husband against the organization that aided his wife in leaving him. At this point it doesn't matter.

The current focus is on rebuilding both their infrastructure and their information base. But how do you do that when you are an organization that can barely afford to pay your employees? How do you buy all new computers in the same fiscal year that you have had to fire four employees from an originally eighteen person staff due to a decrease in the budget? Funding is consistently a major issues for NGOs across the world, but in South Africa in particular. Before the institution of the ANC government in 1994, international funding flowed into the country for basically any organization doing work that was not sanctioned by the government. After 1994 it was assumed that money was being more evenly distributed and foreign investments began to dwindle. Now there are thousands of NGOs around the country and little money to go around. That is where we find Ilitha Labantu today, strapped for cash and facing the idea of having to  rehab the entire inside of their building.

As I walked out of the office for the day about fifteen minutes after I entered, I kept thinking that while I was tucked away in my bed warm and cozy last night, a decision was made and actions were carried out that would impact the lives of countless people. The world doesn't stop when you go to bed.