| SAPLER Population Trust | |
| Splendidly Alive People Within Limited Environmental Resources | |
Our next T-shirt will have on it: "SAVE YOURSELF, SAVE THE PLANET".
A man with a heart condition stands waiting in a long queue at a check-out counter. He has been told to avoid beef. He is very tempted by a packet of beef biltong. If he buys it, he might be risking his own health and the future well-being of his family.
The book, "Your Heart, Your Planet", suggests that he is also risking the health of the wider environment, through excessive use of water, damage to topsoil, and pollution of the air.
A Winterveldt teenage girl is being tempted by an older man, a taxi driver, to have sex in exchange for a pretty dress. She remembers that other people in her class laughed at her for thinking that casual sex was an easy matter.
If she does manage to resist, she at the same time avoids becoming one of the future AIDS casualties, she avoids having to stop her education through having an unplanned baby, and she contributes to the ideal of a stable population.
In our classes in Winterveldt many of the teenagers show an interest in the broader issues of population as well as in their own health. There are illegal migrants there from Mozambique. Their large families are resented.
'What is wisdom? If intelligence is the ability to speak, wisdom is the capacity to listen. If intelligence is the ability to see, wisdom is the capacity to see far...Wisdom represents the capacity to leave the island of our own selves and to move out across the sea...Wisdom, in other words, is perspective' from Demonic Males (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996).
It is said that the Internet will expose all bluff. This issue will go on the Internet.
This year the MPs of South Africa will debate "Population". Everyone of them will be given a copy of this newsletter.
We have printed and are now starting to distribute our RESA booklet. This is a massive fund-raising project addressed to all South Africans and to the World. With the money raised we will:
REACH EVERY SOUTHERN AFRICAN
with free and friendly family planning
REACH EVERY SOUTHERN AFRICAN
teenager with help in making a workable and ethical plan for their sex lives
There is an unmet need in these areas. Our goal is to fill the gap.
The Third Child Eats from the Dustbin
Is the South African public ready to debate the population issue? Yes, yes, yes, say trustees Nthato Motlana, Zanele Mfono and Ann Weinberg, and Honorary Trustee, John Ledger.
John has talked to deep rural adolescents about growing pod trees for fuel and food - and also about population growth. They are happy to discuss both trees and people.
Zanele says, "Population is not a difficult issue." She goes home to rural Transkei and finds that people there are very annoyed with Central Africans coming to South Africa to tell us what to do about population.
"They did not solve their own problem. They allowed their populations to grow far beyond their resources. Who are they to preach to us?"
Nthato talks to gathering in the Free State and Qua Qua about how the water problem and population growth are connected. They gather around him and want to know more.
Ann talks to the people of Alex. One woman says, "We have a saying here that the third child eats from the dustbin. It doesn't only mean that the third child gets less food - it's also that you can't look after so many little ones."
A story comes from Orange Farm. Three children left in a shack, while their mother goes to buy food. They are aged three, two and one. They play with matches. The shack catches alight. The three-year-old runs to get help. The other two die.
What has this to do with the global issue of large refugee populations moving around?
It is related because poverty produces both situations. The poor are most likely to be left out of family planning. The poor are most likely to become refugees.
The poorest of the poor, the bottom of the heap, must not be left out.
Some poor women in Qua Qua decided not to have children at all because they were so sick of poverty.
SUIT ONE SUIT ALL EMPOWER A WOMAN SAVE A NATION
Very frustrating to those who test for job abilities is the ability to find who will stick to a job and get it done. You can set a task for a whole weekend - a difficult task which requires imagination and problem-solving abilities, but the people who emerge triumphant from these tasks do not always manage well in real life challenges.
It is too short a time, and the tasks set cannot be open-ended enough.
The people who worked at this finally decided that it could not be done. The only way to select people was to know them and to know what they had done in the past.
This came to be known as "The Message to Garcia" problem.
During the American Civil War, a Northern general wanted to get a message to a place called Garcia which was the other side of the Southern troops. He called all his officers together and asked them to select someone who could get the message to Garcia.
The man chosen was not an officer and had no specific training. They just knew him. And they knew that he would get the message to Garcia. And he did.
There are many people who will stick steadily to a task. And there are many other people who have loads of bright ideas about how to solve a problem.
The uniqueness and rarity of a Garcia person is that he or she can do both. The person has a flexible stickability. They do not take no for an answer - and they embark on tasks which have never been done before - which have perhaps never even been formulated.
If you are a Garcia person, you think of one hundred ways to solve a problem - think them through and then choose one. If that one does not work you think of one hundred new ways and choose one of them. SAPLER now has to find Garcia people - and then create new ones.
What is SAPLER's "Garcia"? It is exactly what we our name says, "Splendidly Alive People..."
If we could have splendidly alive people by letting people have many children without them and their communities understanding the full social implications of it...then we would say, "Great, go ahead!"
None of the trustees or members of SAPLER have a vested interest in "population control" nor do we care if one group has more children than another. If population became a well-led, inspired and well-funded and no-longer-sensitive issue, then I personally would retire and return to my creative writing.
"Splendidly Alive People" need excellent nutrition from the womb onwards. They need stimulating interactive adult nurturing in their first years of life. And then they need what we now seem about to give them - "Outcome Education".
If you are a person who will get momentarily excited by our booklet idea, collect R10 from each of ten friends at the book club, and then lose the booklet under a pile of papers - then it would be better not to ask for one at all.
But maybe you can encourage the Garcia side of yourself, and tackle this task with cool enthusiasm and persistence.
To cover costs and to discourage fickleness, we are charging R10 for one or two or three booklets.
How much you decide to ask depends entirely on what you think you can persuade the people in your circle to give. You may move in several circles, in one of which people can very easily take out a cheque book and give R100. So you could have a R1 booklet, and a R10 booklet, and a R100 booklet. Or R1 000.
Robert Ramakulukusha at the coffee bar at "Fact and Fiction", Balfour Park, and I often chat about RESA. Robert says he is quite prepared to drive a RESA-mobile into areas other people think are too dangerous. He will find out what the dangers are.
I gave him a booklet when it came out. On Thursday I was shopping for Easter and popped in there for coffee and a browse. I had forgotten about the booklet. Robert put a large glass bottle with a cork lid in front of me - with notes and coins inside.
"Your money," he said. He had lost the booklet, but found it before I had finished my coffee. It had 17 signatures and the money in the bottle was R36.
I realized immediately that in a responsible situation like this there is no need to be consistent about the amount of money given. One person had given R10, several R1, and others in between.
Hail Robert, our first collector.
The RESA (Reach Every South African) booklet published by SAPLER is designed to record the signatures of people who see universal Southern African family planning as an important issue and who are prepared to contribute R1 or more to the Million Rand Project 'for having only healthy unabused, longed-for children who will want to solve South Africa's problems.'
Ask for a booklet and try to reach everyone you can think of to contribute to this project.
De Bono's belief is that the old thinking is not constructive enough. We need new thinking.
One of his strategies is that of the six thinking hats. A group discussing a problem puts on each hat in turn. While wearing a particular hat everyone in the group has to function in a particular mode.
Here is my own attempt to wear each hat and discuss the population problem:
WHITE HAT: State the problem:
South Africa's financial resources do not cover the educational and infrastructure and water needs of her existing population.
RED HAT: Express direct feelings, without anyone saying that your feelings are invalid:
1. "You whites only think about the environment, and not about suffering people."
2. My own emotion: "Why, why, why cannot we address this problem in a direct way, as has been done in COLOMBIA, JAMAICA, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, MAURITIUS, INDONESIA, SRI LANKA, THAILAND, TURKEY, and in the Indian provinces of KERALA and TAMIL NADU. None of these places has used coercion or penalties.
YELLOW HAT: SAPLER's newsletters were originally printed on yellow paper because De Bono's book, "The Positive Revolution" is printed on yellow paper.
This is the positive hat. Why something will work.
1. No one in South Africa is playing the numbers game. No group is having babies in order to outbreed another group, such as is happening in North and South Nigeria, in Rwanda (where women are now having "Revenge Babies"), and between the Arabs and Jews.
2. Most people in South Africa are young. Young people welcome new ideas.
3. In Swaziland, leaders and the press talk openly and directly about their population problem.
BLACK HAT: The negative hat. Why something may not work.
There is a lobby which gets negative self-esteem from claiming that it is not ethical to talk about the population problem. This leads to extremely muddled thinking and confused expression of goals. At the moment this lobby is very powerful. People who think differently from them do not dare to express their views.
GREEN HAT: The creative hat. Any ideas, however outrageous, can be put forward.
This is mine:
Let's hope that Cape Town wins the Olympic bid for 2004. There is only a tiny chance that having won it we will then be able to host it well. But humans with a focus can do almost anything that it is possible to do.
Let us then work towards "WORLD NO BABY YEAR" in the same year. This dramatic idea will focus the attention of the world on the real reason for population growth. 2004 is also the date of the next World Population Conference. Let us host it in Gauteng, while Cape Town hosts the Games.
BLUE HAT: The overview hat.
Let us continue to say that population growth matters. "Ours is an honourable point-of-view. Let us state it simply and often," says a SAPLER member.
Let us continue to contribute to solving the problem at the same time as contributing to individual progress.
Let us not confront the negative people.
The best De Bono story I have heard was shown on M-Net in the years leading up to the New South Africa.
A De Bono teacher was sent to a rural school in North Natal. The headmaster and the teachers had been taught the thinking techniques and the children were shown using the techniques to solve real problems - like what to do about the school cow. In a De Bono exercise you are allowed to come up with any idea, however silly.
But the best moment for me came at the end of the programme, when the headmaster said:
"You know I used to be very anti-white. I used to blame the whites for everything. But since we started this way of thinking - well that's all disappeared. My brain is too busy with new problems.
No De Bono kid would be either for or against the Cairo document on population. They would simply ignore it. De Bono goes "Beyond Yes and No".
IT IS BETTER TO LIGHT ONE CANDLE THAN TO CURSE THE DARKNESS
From Each According to his Ability
You need not take the R1 on our booklet too literally. If you are a friend of Bill Gates, then ask him for R10 million. It is in his interests to have superbly well-educated kids.
Our aim with the booklets is to appeal to anyone who is inspired or worried by a number of different issues.
The idea of one rand from each person who signs was to make it easy for schoolchildren to cope with the money.
One small very worthwhile seminar I attended at the Cairo Conference on Population was on leadership. It was addressed by an Egyptian and attended by about 15 people from about 15 different countries. I think I was the only person of European descent. I sat next to a woman from New Guinea.
What the Egyptians do about getting family planning to very distant villages is to train and select leaders from a very early age. Someone from Cairo goes to the village and gives a small task to all the six-year-olds. When he goes again six months later he gives a slightly more difficult task to those who have succeeded. And so on. In the end you have a competent sixteen-year-old who can handle a complicated task with success.
So too with our booklets. Who will be the first ten-year-old who without help brings us 100 signatures and R100?
These are two key concepts in SAPLER thinking. Marie Stopes gives excellent family planning in many places in the world. But they do not give it universally in any one country.
RESA aims to fill in the gaps in family planning, at first in South Africa and then in Southern Africa. But we do not have to do it all ourselves. If there is a good government health clinic where the family planning facilities are not over-crowded and the nurses not too busy - well, fine. If in a rural area there is a good social marketing plan and people have enough money to participate, then once again, we will leave it to them.
Ultimately we need some command centre - like the one which saved all the people on the Oceanic from drowning - which will check that everyone is reached by somebody.
Outreach implies that something more than just having facilities in place is needed. Many South Africans need information, help in understanding side-effects, transport to the clinics and so on.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich: The that wins inherits a dead planet."
"The vast majority of people has been added ranks of poor, not the rich."
"Why isn't everyone as scared as we are?
Elsie Ottesen-Jensen, Swedish family planner 1993: "I dream of the day when every child that is born is welcome, when men and women are equal and sexuality is an expression of intimacy pleasure and tenderness."
Firstly let us see that no unwanted children are born and then let us see that our wanted children are free from ignorance of ecology and economics, so that they will willingly limit their own children to the carrying capacity of this part of the planet.
We will help individuals with their health; we will help families with their finances; we will help communities to be sustainable - and we will help nations to survive.
The SA Breweries
The Ithuba Trust
The Haggie Charitable Trust
The Desmond Leech Bequest
Facts & Fiction Bookshop