Human and Community Development

  There are sometimes when one feels tired and needs to rest. I felt like that today and talked to my boss about getting some few leave days. In our line of work, burnout is a very common thing. Some few hours later as I reflected on it, I could not stop myself from thinking about mothers of children who live with mental handicaps. Usually persons with handicaps have other physical disabilities that make them immobile and less capable of helping themselves. The mothers do everything for the children including bathing, feeding and even managing the use of the toilet. It is somehow less challenging when the person with handicaps is still an infant. That changes when the person matures, developing a big body and more needs.  The mothers work diligently without leave. They cannot afford to be tired. For many of them, this is the routine, every morning they heave the child onto a wheel chair, 20 to 80kgs depending on the age and the body of the child. They push the wheelcha...

Sunday 18 November 2013 Today I have witnessed an accident. I know it’s not something new, there are many accidents happening every day in our Capital. It has become the order of the day, a topic on our everyday conversations. As I was driving home from town in the evening, man on a motorcycle was disturbed by a commuter omnibus and he lost control of his motorcycle. It threw him on the ground as it skated on the road leaving a line of sparks. Although the accident was horrific, it is not the accident itself that has driven me to write. It is the reaction of the people. Normally, after an accident, people are left with the images of the accident survivors. However, what I still see as residue of the scene in my mind is the faces of the people who passed by, drivers piping through their windows, passengers hissing, pedestrians saying shame but still walking away. Only two people attended to the man, a young person who had seen the accident right in front of him (I forgot ...