JOHANNESBURG PARK STATION STORIES - A LESSON IN HUMILITY

I am scared of visiting Park Station because I always run into someone from my past. In 2008, MaNyoni was going back home to Zimbabwe and I drove her to Park Station to catch a bus to Harare. As we stood in the queue waiting for her to board the bus, a former workmate from Zimbabwe greeted me and with pity in his eyes said, “Oh I heard you are now working in a call centre”.

We had been managers together in Zimbabwe, I was on a higher level than him. He told me that his contract in Angola had ended and he was on his way back to Zimbabwe. At our company they were recruiting and after sending their CVs to recruiters, two of my former workmates from Zimbabwe had already come for interviews and one had started his job. I couldn’t ask this guy in front of me to send me his CV as it was clear that working in the call centre was beneath him. The truth was in the call centre I now earned 18 times more than what I earned in Zimbabwe as a middle level manager.

After he was gone MaNyoni said, “ Akunzirwa tsitsi wena”(He felt pity for you). The following year when we built our house in Zimbabwe MaNyoni teased me and said, “ look what the little money from the call centre has done for us”. A year after that when I bought my first Mercedes she said the same. The moral of the story is never look down upon someone based on your pre-conceived ideas. There were many times I wanted to change jobs and I have always been told, we can’t afford you.

Society has taught us to look down on people based on their titles and appearances and we don’t know how much we miss out. When I worked in Zimbabwe many people did not know how powerful my PA/ secretaries were as their opinions mattered so much to me and I saw the same with my bosses’ PAs and I always showed them respect. Never disrespect anyone, another day in the supermarket I was paying for groceries at the cashier and after greeting her, she asked me if I knew that if I bought two of these items I would get 50% off. I thanked her and she waited patiently as I went back to the shelves.

Many people have domestic employees who cook for them and take care of their kids, if you treat them as animals imagine how they will treat your kids some who can’t even talk yet. Some of the wisest people, I have met did not go to school for example my maternal grandfather. When I grew tobacco in Zimbabwe in the 2016-2017 farming season the people I relied on could barely write their own names but they had so much knowledge and I learnt a lot from them, those men and women are walking encyclopedias on tobacco farming