Health and safety and cleanliness

Going to S.A. you take your life into your hands and I don’t mean because of the high crime rate or illnesses, but mainly because of the lack of health, safety and cleanliness! For instance, in cars, it is common place for them to have chips or cracks in the windscreen and one of the cars we regularly went in even had a crack half the size of the windscreen across it, most talk on their mobiles while driving (though its illegal there I don’t think much is done about it), many cars have no ‘safety belts’ (i.e. seat belts), and more often than not we drove with 4 adults squashed into the back! If I was going to die in S.A., it certainly would be in a car. Other examples of a lack of health and safety concern, are that people hung off the back of trucks as they drove along, and construction work (which actually happened remarkably quickly, i.e. we saw whole roads and buildings built during our time there rather than them taking months or years!) on roads had no tape blocking it off or other safety devises so that you could, or in some cases had to, walk literally a few inches from a guy with a pneumatic drill drilling into the concrete or using a massive saw type thing cutting the pavement in half!

The second issue slightly related to this is the lack of cleanliness which I found quite worrying indeed! When we moved into the little flat at COTT, though the bedsheets were clean, I’m not sure much else had been cleaned! E.G. See the close up pic of my bedside table below. Also the bath was yellow inside instead of white and when you filled it with water and sat in it,it smelled really quite bad! Dom and I found some bathroom cleaner from Pick ‘n’ Pay, it took literally ages of really hard scrubbing to get it off, leaving me to wander if the bath had ever been cleaned at all! Finally, with regards our flat, it was never cleaned during the 3months we were there, while of course we could now clean the bathroom, we couldn’t hoover as we didn’t have a hoover despite trying our best to find one. This lack of cleanliness was also present in individuals as several of them smelt quite bad and many wore the same clothes all week despite the incredible heat and therefore sweating.

I guess it just goes to show that what is important to us, is not as important to others.