The ten essential qualities of a real woman

One of the many things that bugs me is adult females who act in ways which I think disqualifies them from the honour of calling themselves real women. I wish I could have given myself this advice when I was in my late teens / early twenties. So here are the qualities that I think every woman should possess, in no particular order:

1. Take responsibility: whether you have kids, are in a marriage / long-term relationship, are working or studying, you need to take responsibility for yourself and any dependants you may have. Being older than 20 and expecting your family to pick up the pieces every time you drop the ball is not on. Feeling a sense of entitlement without earning it is rubbish on every level. If you can vote, you are responsible for your own actions. If you feel that your private life is nobody’s business but your own, don’t expect anyone to pay your bills or fix your mess if you stuff up.

2. Be reliable: of all the words you would like people to describe you with, “flaky” is probably not one of them. Don’t let people down, don’t be late for meetings, appointments, work or exams and perform tasks and responsibilities on time.

3. Show honour: as an adult you must see all people as human beings and respect them equally as such. Put other people first and put yourself forward as an upstanding member of your community, your company and your family. Don’t follow; lead instead.

4. Find your dignity: this is not self-righteousness. Dignity comes from others respecting you as a person, and you perpetuating that respect. If something negative happens to you, don’t react negatively. Don’t drag yourself down to the antagonist’s level. If you feel angry or hurt, try to keep a cool head, don’t spit out abuse and go somewhere to cool off before you respond to the situation. Also, expect others to treat you with dignity. Don't allow your partner to treat you unequitably. If he can't treat you right, it's time to move on.

5. Lose the drama: I have known of plenty of women (whom I have since "unfriended") of all ages who share their sob stories with everyone to get sympathy. Their Facebook and Twitter statuses are filled with sordid details of make-ups, break-ups and insults aimed at in-laws, bosses, colleagues and friends. But often, making your personal issues public to the world can only cause more conflict, because gossip spreads like wildfire. Ultimately, you will come off worse for being immature.

6. Give instead of taking: Don’t expect everything to always be done for you. People who work and earn without depending on others for bailouts generally are much more independent, driven, ambitious and successful. In addition to this work ethic, helping others in any way (it doesn’t have to be financially) helps you to be a more compassionate person. Being a selfish human being is not a particularly desirable or attractive personality trait. When you become more considerate and helpful, you will find people will be more willing to help you when you need support. Remember, being negative attracts people who will respond negatively in turn and being positive attracts people who will react positively towards you.

7. Empower yourself: Don’t be a vegetable and wallow in misery or boredom. Get out there in the world and have a can-do attitude. Always expand your horizons and be willing to learn new things. Even if your current circumstances prevent you from fulfilling a dream, there is always an alternative, another path to travel that will lead you towards what you really want. It doesn't mean you have to be a ball-breaking business executive, though. Whatever makes you happy and boosts your self-confidence is just as good. Don’t put yourself down and say you’re not intelligent enough. Prove your inner demon wrong.

8. Be comfortable being alone: Don’t ever, ever allow a man to affect your happiness. If for some reason your relationship doesn’t work out, don’t abase your dignity and crawl back to him just because you can’t see yourself without him. And if it’s really over, don’t go jumping into the arms of the next man that makes a pass at you. You are a human being in your own right and if you can’t stand the thought of being a lone unit, one whole person that doesn’t need another to survive, then you need to talk to a qualified counsellor to figure out why you feel invalid as a single person.

9. Accept blame: Don’t blame your parents or your ex for your personality problems. You are an adult and as adults we all have to accept responsibility for our actions as adults. Yes, all of us have mother and father issues, sibling rivalries, previous boyfriend/husband issues. I’d guess over half of the readers here would consider themselves having had a ‘tough childhood’ or ‘bad parents’. However, any person should be able to work through their issues, learn from them and become better people, not worse. It’s a poor example of a woman that blames someone else for her inadequacies when it comes to life choices.

10. Do what is right: No matter what our religious background or family dysfunction, we have all learned the difference between right and wrong. Period. There are no excuses for lying, stealing, committing adultery, etc. A strong moral foundation is essential to being a strong woman. You can pretend to be a good, strong woman, but if you keep breaking the rules and acting unethically, one day the truth will come knocking and you will be exposed.

We all need time and experience to reach maturity after leaving school. Some people, however, can die of old age before they get there. So beef up and take responsibility for your actions before it’s too late!

Oh, and in case any guys are sitting back in their chairs comfortably, smiling at this post, your turn is coming…

Sarafina III

(Click on the cartoon to enlarge)

It emerged on Wednesday that the South African Department of Human Settlements, previously known as the Department of Housing, has spent over R22,5 million rand on producing a play to "educate" people about their efforts. This ridiculous waste of money even beats the scandal provoked by the Department of Health's R14 million production of Sarafina II to educate the public about HIV and AIDS.

The previous minister, Lindiwe Hendricks (now the Minister of Defence), signed off on the play and its expenses during the 2008/9 financial year, despite the fact that the backlog of people waiting to receive government housing is so APPALLING it has backed right up to 2 million and the expected bill for fixing up existing shoddily-built RDP houses is expected to top R1 billion.

I'm sure the play was very effective in furthering the aims of the Department (to steal as much money as possible from the poor and place it in the pocket of the family member who produced the play). After all, it's only a recession...

"Every one of you is a guardian"

In a world of six billion people, survival is an important part of life. India is a perfect case in point; where in a country with a billion inhabitants, the act of merely getting a place to sit on a train has become something you could easily be maimed over. Capitalism, consumerism and industrialisation are the key proponents of inequality in democratic countries, but in all other types of economic models that have tried and failed, poverty and inequality have always been enduring problems.

Should the CEO of a large corporation be allowed to have a Lear jet and a castle in Scotland while the employee who manufactures his products in a Chinese sweatshop earns less than a dollar day? Is it right for an actor to get paid millions of dollars for appearing in one movie while 246 million children around the world are classified as child labourers? Should the entertainment industry be glorifying sex and the objectification of women when a million children are exploited by the commercial sex trade every year?

“Every one of you is a guardian, and responsible for what is in his custody. The ruler is a guardian of his subjects and responsible for them; a husband is a guardian of his family and is responsible for it; a lady is a guardian of her husband's house and is responsible for it, and a servant is a guardian of his master's property and is responsible for it." - Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. (taken from Sahih Bukhari, [Book #46, Hadith #733])

This saying indicates how far we have strayed from the natural order of life, responsibility, justice and humanity. Many guardians seem to have turned a blind eye while their wards are violated in plain sight.

This puts me in mind of another quote:

"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues." - Rene Descartes

Money and the acquisition thereof is the primary objective of almost every human being on this planet. Even if we don’t like the system, we toil away at whatever we can to make a living for ourselves and our families. For people who live above the bread line, money is something we always need more of, because we are always desirous of the latest technology, a better car or our own home. Money is the primary source of stress, a leading cause of divorce and it makes those who have it think they are better than those who don’t.

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting in on an HIV workshop for refugee women and one of the things I noticed was the huge divide in desires between the haves and have-nots. The facilitator asked each woman in the room to say what made them happy. The non-refugee (and obviously better-off) women who were there to assist, like myself, said our families made us happy, or gave some arty-farty intellectual response to this question. But almost every single refugee sitting at that table said that two things made them happy; food and money.

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

So apart from a lot of talk and no action, what is the point of this post? Maybe to remind all of us that this is the world we live in. We may not be able to change it by ourselves, but walking past the person sitting on the roadside with our noses in the air, while we wait for our governments to sort out the mess is just plain hypocritical.

Maybe we need to find a way to pass on our skills, be they in agriculture, English, computer literacy or entrepreneurship to the people who need it most. Perhaps we need to mentor a disadvantaged person, or adopt an orphaned or abused child.

What we don’t need is another million-dollar talk shop for our leaders, where little or nothing ever gets accomplished.

"A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities." - Dalai Lama

We also need to be so much more vocal about the things in our society that we know are unacceptable and unjust. Up until now, we have never spoken out. But laissez-faire may just be passé for 2010.

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s foolish to think that one little blog post could change the world, or make this broken, overpopulated, sick world an altruistic utopia, but if we all exhorted one another to enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong (to paraphrase the Qur’an), perhaps we would be less likely to forget.

I will climb down off my soapbox now, but not before I leave you with these beautiful words of wisdom from the Mahatma:

"The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles."
Mohandas K. Gandhi

Peace,
Hajira

La Sezon Kreol

I’ve never been rich. Ever since I was small I remember feeling very envious of all my friends in primary school who had televisions and telephones in their bedrooms and thinking I was the poorest kid in the whole school. We lived in a council house, had a black and white television in the lounge and didn’t have a telephone.

My mother sewed all my clothes and I envied the other children their Disney merchandise and the latest Barbie dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids and Care Bears. I coveted all these things wantonly and I was never grateful to my parents for the two times a year I would get a present – Christmas and my birthday.

Not that my brother and I didn’t have toys, but they were generally hand-me-downs. I used to look forward to seeing my grandparents or godparents because they would squeeze a couple of pounds into the palm of my little hand as they were saying goodbye. It was the best feeling in the world.

I’d never spend the money, unlike my brother, who would blow it all on sweets within a week. I would always carefully salt my gift money away together with my princely pocket money of 50p a week (which was payment for a list of household chores I did for my mother). When my money tin was full I would go down to the bank with mother and deposit it in my savings account. When I left England with my parents at the age of ten I had managed to amass a fortune of a thousand pounds.

Then my father used my savings in Seychelles because we were in a financial mess. Well, my parents did put me through school, feed me and clothe me throughout my childhood so I guess I am the one that still owes them.

I thought we were poor in England but Seychelles introduced me to a new world of poverty. We lived in a house (for want of a better word) in the middle of a rainforest. The “house” was made of tin, or corrugated iron, the walls and the roof. The floor was cold concrete. We had no furniture and my parents slept on the floor for a year and a half. My brother and I slept on deck chairs, the long type that can be set out straight. They often collapsed or snapped shut in the middle of the night, leaving crooked limbs sticking out unnaturally, bruises to be counted the next morning.

Our stove was paraffin and we had no fridge. We also had no hot water, so my mother would fill a large kettle and boil it, then put it in a large plastic bucket and we would wash ourselves like that.

When you live in a rainforest one thing you will get tired of very quickly is, er, rain. And humidity. If you wash your clothes and put them out to dry on the line little black spots of mould will form on them before you have a chance to take them down.

Even though I am still not well-off enough to stop having panic attacks about the end of the month, I now live in South Africa, and although it’s not first-world, we have all the amenities here (unless you are unfortunate enough to be one of the millions of people in this country who live in an informal settlement). But in urban areas, we do enjoy the trappings of modern life. We have televisions, fancy cars, brick and mortar houses, high-speed internet access, geysers, electricity (most days - ha!), refuse removal and all the rest of it. However, if you asked me which kind of life I preferred, I would take the rainforest in Seychelles any day over this over-sexed, over-stressed rat race.

The Seychelles is not a utopia. It has many problems associated with your typical third-world country. Corruption, nepotism, inflation, socialism with all its pitfalls and an unstable food supply are just some of those things. It’s tough to make inroads in a country where the entire population is about 75 000, everyone knows one another and they are distrustful of outsiders. It’s a bit like being a mouse living in a cattery.

However, it may just be one of the best places in the world for your kid to grow up. Mahe, the main island, boasts pristine white beaches around the coast and lush, diverse rainforests inland. The islands abound with unique flora and fauna which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

Three languages are spoken in Seychelles – the native Creole, French and English. A working knowledge of French is recommended, but the Creole language is one of the easiest in the whole world. Imagine, no masculine or feminine! No “le” or “la”! What joy abounds in my heart! Everyone and everything is an “it”…

Every weekend, my brother and I used to explore the stream running past our house. We would take large sticks to break down the cobwebs (in Seychelles you get orange-and-black spiders as big as dinner-plates) that would stretch from one side to the other. We hopped from one rock to another while our dog Churchill would forge ahead in the icy water ahead of us, urging us on with incessant yaps of joy.

The rainforest was full of cinnamon trees, and the smell of the bark was indescribably delicious. I would often pick the hard, bright green leaves and break them in half just to drink in the smell of cinnamon. If I close my eyes I can still get the outline of the smell in my memory.

My mother’s parents had an estate near Anse Boileau, and everything you could possibly imagine was grown in that place. Jack fruit, oranges that looked like lemons, bread fruit, zamalak fruit (my personal favourite and unique to Seychelles), coffee, tea, coconuts, bananas, pamplemousse (a sort of sweet grapefruit) and so much more. The smell I associate with the estate is coffee beans, being roasted slowly in a large Marmite pot on an open fire by my grandmother.

Just a short walk and you were at the beach, where my uncle would go out in his boat, wearing only his underpants (cringe). Every evening he would return with the most beautiful fish you have ever seen or tasted in your life, lobsters, crayfish, crabs, octopus and small sharks. The fish would be grilled and served with plain rice and sometimes vegetables. My mother’s family’s estate was one of the few truly self-sufficient farms I have ever seen. The only foodstuffs they ever needed to buy were things like rice and perhaps oil and flour.

There are two things which were quite difficult to obtain in Seychelles – milk and potatoes. I hated milk powder with such a passion that I still can’t drink it today. I’m sure that these days the Seychelles Marketing Board imports long-life milk from South Africa or India, so I could probably live with that. And potatoes… how this little English child longed for fried chips! They tried to make chips from bread fruit, which was deliciously sweet, to satisfy my craving but to my mind it was, well, close but no cigar.

The schools in Seychelles are big on corporal punishment. My headmistress, Miss Lize, was a lady who, if you had met her socially, would never seem the type of person who would stalk the corridors with a large cane gripped in her dainty fingers, searching for a suitable child to beat the living crap out of, but there you go.

This is actually a huge improvement on my mother’s time at the same school I attended, Baie Lazare School, which was back in those days run by nuns. When you think of nuns, you invariably conjure up a picture in your head of humble, wrinkled, smiling old ladies doing the Lord’s work. But if you were to believe my mother, they were sado-masochistic agents of the devil, continually devising new methods of torture upon any children unfortunate enough to draw attention to themselves.

If a child was caught doing anything funny in class, his or her offending head would be cracked against the blackboard. If two of them were caught talking in class, two unfortunate skulls would be cracked together. Anyone caught speaking Creole instead of the more “civilised” French would be made to stand outside all day on one leg holding two large bricks up in their outstretched hands while the tropical sun beat down on them. Cries begging for mercy or water went unheeded and if the child lost his balance or dropped the bricks a public caning was in store.

Every day beatings were handed out left, right and centre, rained down upon hands, heads, buttocks and any other area of flesh available. This is probably why my mother was never very interested in pursuing an education.

It continually amazes me that my mother still thinks of herself as a devout Catholic. My experiences with the Church were enough to put me off for life, but she is a real keeper, for better or worse.

All in all, I am proud of my Seychellois heritage. I am proud to be a Seychelloise citizen. Not many people can say their country’s president visited them at their house. Hardly anyone can say they grew up in an island paradise. And very few people even know where the Seychelles is. They don’t know about our traditional Sega music and dance. They don’t know what it’s like to live off the land and make soup from clams dug from your very own beach. So perhaps I was not really poor, perhaps I was rich and just didn’t know it at the time.

©Hajira Amla 2009 – all rights reserved.