I’ll do it my way, thank you.
According to popular culture, people and books will change you over the next 5 years, more than anything else and so when our new neighbour, fresh from Gauteng invited us for a an intellectual soiree at his house to listen to a speaker on business concepts and all things clever, both J and I accepted graciously as this fitted in perfectly with our urban renewal strategy, called “know thy neighbour,” a phrase recently coined by me. On top of this, I was also secretly chuffed, (being someone with low intellectual esteem) that I had been chosen to attend too, knowing he was a hot dog, working for the world’s most prestigious motor company, I made the assumption that I was to become one of the inner circle…
So, off we went to enlarge our minds and friendship circle (all done in one fell swoop) and it was good to see some familiar faces, even if their lower bodies were an oddity and no offense meant here, its just that most of them I know from having a waving thing going as they zoom past me and my car which is permanently parked in the access street to the rest of the neighbourhood, and so I only ever see their upper torso and head, (it was good to know that they weren’t hand puppets.)
I noticed the speaker standing to one side, blond, beige and bland, while I worked the room and it was interesting, that J positioned himself in the back row, (a throw-back, I suspect to his Matie days and inglorious career there in the Landbou Fakulteit,) while I sat down in the front row, which recalled my teacher’s pet status from school, when all the other girls flattened their elacticised hats till they resembled a wilted cabbage leaf as a sign of girlish rebellion, whereas moi walked around with her perfect, coming up roses, specimen. No wonder they couldn’t stand my guts, me hatted and always standing in a balletic first position…(the mad hatter my children would comment here.)
The chairs were facing the television screen and happy photos of the neighbour and his family, played out, then he stood in front of us with the speaker’s very obscure CV, ending on a slight but noticeable, symbolic tap on the fingers for the likes of me, “julle moet konsentreer en luister want Ms X het al die pad van Gauteng gekom en haar waardevolle tyd hier kom deel met ons”. In sleepy hollow of a Paarl I must add and therefore our gratitude should be all the greater, I assumed was the slightly sinister implication. I also found, this last line of his, smacking of the “ou Suid Afrika,” shut up and listen because I know best for you and I began to worm in my chair.
The speaker knew me, “agge nee man,” from school days and I had to confess, in front of all, that I had no memory of her, and so I got a big black tick next to my name right from the start.
They began with a video, which would demonstrate the key business principles of this new wonderful thinking and so I eagerly leant forward, not wanting to miss a thing and to make up for my horrible memory and faux pas.
It was animated and appeared geared for the intellectual consumption of grade 0 to 1, I thought, so I pulled faces, trying harder to understand. Something was very wrong with me obviously, this was all so clever that it went completely over my head and I just didn’t get it.
Then Ms X took the floor and very carefully and very convincingly, began to create a scenario of unfullfillment and frustration in us, her captive audience. She listed a lot of so called wants and needs and desires on the screen and as she spoke them through I then knew I was lost to the cause, as my mental answer to each and everyone was the opposite of what she, our teacher was expecting from us, especially me all alone in the front row and her knowing me and all.
After an hour of equating, happiness equals money and goods and no work and free holidays the name, Amway appeared, in very small print in the top left hand corner and then I knew why I was having déjà vu. Ten years ago I had had a visit from two women who sat in my small house, where one could spit on the neighbour’s kitchen window, trying their best to convince me my life sucked and after trying each and every trick they had learnt at their leadership conferences, they gave up on me , disgusted with my contentment, driving off in their silver shiny car with the registration plate, “Dreams, WP.”
And so here I was again being confronted to become part of the great American dream, of materialism, that has proven to be morally bankrupt, that has proven to be unsustainable.
At the end of the talk, no time for questions was given, they simply whipped out forms and files to fill and so I walked over to the speaker, thanked her for her precious time and informed her I would not be needing the forms, now or never. On that note, J and I excused ourselves, me fuming inside, that I had been duped in coming under the pretence of enlightenment, of community. The religion of me-me-me.
I liked J’s take on it when he shook her hand and left, “we’’ll do it our way and not the Am-way, thank you.”
The only good to come out of the evening was to be confronted with all the “desirables” that money, (which you don’t have as yet) can buy and to be calm and at peace in oneself, content and grateful for what you do have, in family, in friends, in work, and something that they never mentioned not even once, to be in a position to give back to the community you live in, to share with those less privileged.
Our third daughter has just come back from Malawi and her experiences of people with so “little” in the conventional western sense and yet so much, to my mind have more than any Amway program, can ever give.
What she has to tell and share resonates with me. I’ll go with that.
