One Day..

One day and only one day, when I am all grown up...

Will I wake up and have no troubles, there will be no wondering of what next, there will be no ulcers there will be no 'not now, maybe later'. There will be no next month, there will be no'only R100 93 please'.

There will be a offroad trailer in the driveway, there will be time to enjoy and not worry, there will be only laughter and joy...

This is my wish, but not just for me, but for everybody!

I have a good friend who taught me one of the most important lessons in life. He taught me that although money buys you things, the most important thing that money buys you is time. Time to enjoy with family and friends, time to spend with your children, time to spend exploring the world, time to read and relax, or just time.

When I first heard this it immediately rang true and it also highlighted the difference in how people perceive the world. People who are financially sound know the value of time, whereas people who are not financially secure crave after worldly things. You see the camper van and a sense of envy starts to rear its ugly head, you see the overseas holiday and you immediately think 'what have I done wrong', or 'that lucky bastard'...but you don't see the thing that it is all about, you don't see the time.
We don't see that his money gave him the opportunity to spend time doing what he loves, that time that helps us to unwind and reset after a strenuous event.

So where does this leave me?
It leaves me with the following...

One day, and only one day, when we are all grown up...

There will be time to spend with friends and family, there will be time to explore, there will be time to sit around a campfire, there will be time to teach and a time to learn...

This is my wish for you...TIME.

What if.....

What if...

What if only people with successful careers could vote...
What if only people with degrees could occupy positions in parliament...
What if people realise that whatever they destroy has to be rebuilt...
What if we instituted more stringent border control...
What if we brought back National Service...
What if we increased VAT instead of taxing the rich...
What if we provided all school textbooks for free...
What if we standardised all school textbooks...
What if children had the opportunity to complete grade 1-7 in their Mother Tongue...
What if we started socialising with our neighbours again...
What if we started sitting on our stoeps again...
What if we do away with all forms on racial profiling...
What if we make prisoners do hard labour...
What if we make prisoners do maintenance of our parks and recreational areas...
What if we create rural infrastructure to curb urbanisation...
What if we produce instead of export...
What if we invest in renewable energy instead of nuclear...
What if populist politics become the norm in society due to the economic crisis...


What if we all stopped asking what if and start to act...

The Toolbox Continued...

...gets real very quickly!


All I want to say is that friends you made in the 80's are real. Thank you....

The Tool Box

It has been a long journey to here, many things has happened and not to be a bore, they are still continuing, but I came to realise that for most part we are NOT alone.
We all had our share of ups and downs over the last couple of months, and every time I felt that I was alone, someone came to the rescue.
This brought me to my "toolbox" theory.

The "Toolbox" Part One

As we start our journey through life we all start with an empty "toolbox", and the first tools that we have in our box we don't collect but rather is given to us, the family.

These are the tools, that in most cases stays in your box and takes up no space whatsoever. In most cases family is like the Gorilla wrench, ready for any size nut!
The Gorilla sometimes tightens the nut and other times gives it slack, any situation always and without fail.
 Family is also the Q20 (or (WD40) in the toolbox, correctly applied (in other words if you ask for advice and listen to it!) it can loosen any nut.
However, in many toolboxes the Gorilla is rusted, the teeth are broken and the Q20 can empty as we neglect these tools the most often! We don't treat them correctly and they become damaged.
Instead of just taking it out and refurbishing it some people (me included) are to afraid to touch it because we don't know how to fix it....but we forget, it doesn't take up any space, it will never break, just become damaged, but will never break!

As we progress on our journey we start to collect our own tools, these includes our skills, education, experiences, personality and our friends. Believe it or not, each day, each moment adds something to the tool box!
We carry this box with us and sometimes this box is so heavy that it feels as if it drags us down. We just keep on adding to the box, never looking in it, never evaluating the tools, just adding all the time, making it heavier and bigger.
As we come into challenging situations, we always want to fix things ourselves, because that is the nature of man, sometimes this works and you can patch or fix a problem other times the glue just doesn't want to work! So you apply more, increase the drying time, roughen up the edges all to no avail it just doesn't want to hold! This creates frustration and just increase the break as you take off more of the edges,  or the glue creates even more bulges! (Never even looking in the toolbox for the correct type of glue!

Realising You Have a Toolbox

Once the realisation dawns on you that you have a toolbox your whole life changes! For me it was a struggle, being chased by the black dog, circumstances that drew me like a moth to a flame, closer and closer to the end...
You need to sit down and carefully evaluate our life, "where am I heading, how will I overcome this next hurdle that was put on my path". If you are lucky you realise this by yourself as you sit and relax, taking stock of your life, or you may be forced into it by circumstances.
Then when you are alone, and if you are lucky you remember your toolbox! you rush to your garage and start to look for the toolbox, hidden under a layer of dust deep in a back corner.

Opening the Tool Box

So I started to look carefully at this "toolbox", weighing up all the "tools" inside, taking out all the tool and separating them into various groupings, "broken" , "serviceable", "neglected", "new" etc.
It was hard to do, as you realise that some of the tools you broke! and some of the serviceable ones are in dire need of attention!
You find, as you rummage through it that some of the tools you have are so outdated that they have no "use" at all, just plain junk! You ask yourself how did I let this happen?, how will I ever fix this?, the questions never stops!
The emotions that you unleash...

Well till next time...

Exploiting kids....where is our social responsibility?

Everything around us has been influenced by technology in some way or another, and don't get me wrong I am a strong proponent of technology, it makes our understanding of the world so much better. We have the opportunity to make informed decisions, something not every previous generation can say. Yes sure there is lots of misleading (propaganda) on the interweb, but by careful analysis we can eventually see the truth.

Another great advantage of technology is the fact that it creates for more interactive teaching and learning, something that is close to my heart as I am passionate about my working environment. 

It makes learning more accessible to the masses, everybody can get the same opportunities , costs are reduced as books doesn't have to be printed in large quantities and the revision of material can happen instantaneous, right?

Well not quite it seems. Parents in South Africa were told to invest in tablets and e-books as it will create better opportunities, they will have the ability to have instant access to information, e-books will be cheaper, better interaction with teachers etc. 

To find that this is not the case was quite sobering for me, children (or at least my kids and those of our friends) struggle to learn from tablets, they need some form of printed material that can be marked, annotated and man-handled! 

So I phoned the supplier as I couldn't get the pages that the kids needed in order to prepare for their test to print.....and what was the response, sorry due to copy right laws you cannot print the pages, WTF! I bought the book its mine I can do with it what I want, that's what I thought right. Only to be corrected again by our esteemed supplier who informed me that I actually only bought a license to have the book on a tablet for 12 months!....again WTF! and to make things worst nobody, at any stage conveyed this bit of information to me or any other parent that I know of!

So it all boils down to this, my eldest has a set of e-books, which I payed for (and may I add that the price of the e-book is not significantly cheaper only about R20 difference between the hard copy and the e-book), now any person would think it is my book I would hand it to my youngest in a years time, no-no-no, new books!

SO here is the deal:

1. The books you PAY for is not yours, you only have a license and nobody tells you that!

2. You cannot print any pages due to "copy right laws".

3. You have to buy hardcover books because children struggle to learn from the e-books (are you keeping track, because you are paying twice by now!).

4. You must get a tablet (another expense) and data (as the one is useless without the other).

Taking this into consideration, would you have made the investment in a tablet in the first case, I think not! Do you think that education is then truely made accessible to everyone? 

Hard copy books can be handed down and children can truely use it to learn.

I am a curriculum developer, I've had enough of this, I think........I should write schools books and make it open source so that no kid in our wonderful country should ever pay for books again! They can have it as e-books, hardcopy or anything they want.

This message needs to get some feet!

Till next time.

Cooking Frogs

If nothing changes, then everything stays the same.
If a tree falls in the woods, and there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?



This must be the first time in my life that I sit down to write something and its a struggle to get my thoughts down on paper!
Can it be the fact that I'm seriously annoyed with the political situation in the country, or for that matter in the world?
Can it be the global economic situation?
Can it be that people sell their soles to the highest bidder?
Can it be that I'm just not interested in the world around me anymore?


I cannot answer any of these questions truthfully, I just know that its more difficult to really stimulate the grey matter.
Nothing in the world is a surprise anymore, nothing shocks us anymore, we take everything for granted, if a natural catastrophe hits we say, "that's not surprising the Bible warns about it", or "that's not surprising, geologists predicted that it will happen". If a person is murdered in his house we say "that's not surprising what do expect living in South Africa". If a child goes on the rampage in an American school we say "that's not surprising, what do they expect with such lax gun control measures", and so I can carry on about things that just does not surprise us anymore, things that would have shocked the living daylights out of us a few years ago, just doesn't do it for anymore.


We have become so accustomed to the world we live in that our morals have degenerated to such an extend that within a decade or two from now, we will not be able to distinguish between right or wrong, fact or fiction (OK actually I'm 10 years to late, its already happening)!
If we don't like the sound of something we "change the real meaning of the author" or we just say "that should not be taken literally, but be seen in context", I'm not going to mention examples, I'll leave that to you go and do some sole searching and see how the frogs are being cooked.
Small changes that is made to society and the things that we are used too. Take the example of a simple tomato, its still red, it still has pips but have you really tasted it in recent times, or so called "fresh milk" that lasts more that a week in the fridge! Come on really!


I am fortunate enough to live within 5 km of a functioning dairy farm and we started buy our milk and cheese there about a month ago. Yesterday my youngest asked what is wrong with the milk, I smelled it, and low-and-behold the milk went sour! She is 11 and for the first time she saw milk that has gone off!, because the other "fresh milk" never went sour. Now the question, did we really drink fresh milk all these years? What do they add or remove from the milk to make it last that long? Is it healthy?
I don't know, all I know is that its time to re-evaluate our truths.


Till next time.

Stop it, you'll do more damage than good!

I have a blog and really love writing it, but somehow the real need to write has left me. On my PC the draft of my book is gathering dust. The one who read the first couple of chapters regards it as something out of this world, that should be burned so that no human could ever be exposed to such rubbish ever again!

I on the other hand, I felt it was good, but then again all parents think that their children are the best in the world. 

And guess what, it hurts, yes it does, when you come to the realisation that your child is not the next, Chuck Norris, Einstein, or Bakkies Botha, nope, no matter what you do, no matter how many teachers you suck up to, no matter how many coaches you befriend, your child is just not what you dreamed of!

And that is the problem, parents wants to live through their kids, they never played first team, but will make damb sure their kids will, they never achieved any academic results but little Johnny will become a Nuclear Physicist! 

At no point do they just sit back and give them the opportunity to grow themselves, isn't that what we are suppose to do, shouldn't parents create a safe and secure environment for kids to grow up in, so that they can grow into their own, explore their surroundings and with care, love and guidance be nurtured into adult-hood.

To be there when your child discovers his/her God-given talent to sing, when they realise their passion, or make you proud by applying wisdom beyond their age!, or when their innocence and love makes the day bearable for someone less fortunate?

They say that not one snowflake is the same as the next, not one person alive today has the same DNA as another, so let’s embrace the gifts we have been given, lets enjoy every child with the same passion, love, grace and attention. Let’s not fall into the trap of setting one above the other or comparing X with Y, accept X for what it is, and accept Y for what its not.

We should sit back, let the child sit on your lap while you gently guide the steering wheel, don’t always just drive, and you will be amazed where you will end up!

Well till next time!