Lyall Green
‘Five members of the Springbok cricket team were found smoking dagga in celebration of their historic test victory over the West Indies,” the newsreader blurted out the headline story.
Dagga is such a lovely South African word, which people use with glee and the rough intonation it demands every time anyone is found transgressing the law. It was the same word that was written on our charge sheet, reading: “In possession of dagga.”
None of the other names such as marijuana, dope, pot or “holy herb”, as the Rastafarians call it, has the same ability to make the culprits feel that they have committed a heinous crime for which society demands full retribution.
Two friends and I were caught in a similar manner to that of Herschelle Gibbs and the cricket boys, enjoying a couple of joints in the privacy of a friend’s flat the week before Christmas when the police barged in and summarily arrested us.
Unlike our famous cricketers though, we enjoyed the privilege of four hours with two policemen trying to convince us that they were only doing their job and that we should look upon them as our friends.
They even told us that we were ripped off on the bankie of dope we had bought, and that we could have picked it up at R15 instead of the R50 we paid on the street.
One of the cops even confessed that he had smoked a couple of joints in Amsterdam, subtly implying that he was one of us and empathised with our predicament. Of course this new-found friendship, which existed only in his mind, ended abruptly when he took down our statements and promptly dispatched us off to a jail cell with two Nigerians.
Then after a night of anxiety, we were thankfully pushed on to the court roll that Friday where the case was routinely postponed for two weeks. We then followed the normal procedure, which saw us throw ourselves on the mercy of the prosecutor and as first-time offenders were diverted from the criminal justice system into 100 hours of community service.
One’s hours of community service can be spent in many different ways: cataloguing books in a library, helping out at a street shelter, cleaning penguins, hacking and stacking pine trees, or the most popular choice, working as a porter in a government hospital.
It was while doing time in hospital that I heard on the TV news the follow-up story of the dope-smoking cricketing scandal, where a reporter went around collecting views from Manenberg residents about the punishment meted out to the transgressors.
“I think it is wrong. I mean if one of us had done it we would have gone to prison. Why should they be any different?” one of the residents asked.
The truth of the matter is, though, that besides the obligatory one night in jail, as first-time offenders it is highly unlikely that Gibbs and his cronies would have served any prison time. They would instead have been forced to strike up a friendship with us while getting lost pushing patients around the large and thoroughly morbid halls of a decaying government hospital.
One thing is certain, though: no other experience could have brought them back down to society’s level than to the exposure to pain and discomfort that one witnesses in a government hospital.
The hours I have so far spent wheeling patients from one section of the hospital to the other, noticing their obvious pain along with their puzzlement while they try to work out how I fit into the picture, has given me rare insights into the community that I am now being forced to serve.
In my past five-hour shift, for instance, I have seen a tow-truck drop off a vagrant in the casualty waiting room with a huge gash on the side of his head, wailing loudly and uncontrollably for somebody to come and take care of him. The nurses, however, already had their hands full taking care of somebody who had been assaulted and was walking around with a large bandage over his stomach trying to hold in the blood that was oozing out of him at a rapid rate.
I was asked by a clearly shaken and anxious young woman whether I could find out if a man who had just been assaulted had been wheeled into the casualty ward. Her earlobes had large gashes in them, where we suspected her earrings had been ripped off. The very ugly face of crime had been brutally exposed to me.
Later that evening, sometime in the middle of Ally McBeal, I had to wheel an oversized patient from the casualty ward to the intensive care unit on the seventh floor. He was extremely red and struggling to breathe, indicating to me with my extremely limited medical knowledge that he had experienced some form of a heart attack. As we went up in the lift together I smiled meekly at him, trying to offer some form of comfort, lowly porter that I was.
That was not to be my last visit to the seventh floor, though, as a call came through to the porter’s office just before I was about to set off home. Somebody had just passed away, and my friend and I had to go up and transport the body to the mortuary.
It was an experience that we both knew we would have to confront at some stage, but it still didn’t prepare us for that eerie and disturbing action of moving a body lightly wrapped up in cloth on to a customised stretcher trolley and transporting it through the dark grounds of the hospital to the mortuary at the back.
A week previously I had lifted a body from the mortuary into the back of a forensic van, but this time the experience was far more sobering. The body we had to move from the hospital bed was still warm and soft to the touch. As we struggled to lift it on to the trolley, an elderly woman in the adjacent bed woke up and demanded to know what we were doing. She started to protest and she began to wail that we were scaring her.
At that moment I could feel the extreme anxiety that she must have felt lying in intensive care, hearing a dead patient in the bed next to her being unceremoniously dispatched from the ward. No doubt, thoughts of her own mortality must have rushed in, along with the discomforting thought that your lifeless body is simply carted away without any thought being given to the soul that had just occupied it.
As a humble porter who has simply been thrust into this completely unfamiliar situation as a result of sucking on some weed, it is certainly not easy to offer any form of solace to an elderly women struggling with her inevitable fate!
I haven’t even reached the halfway mark of my community service and, undoubtedly, I will still be spending many a night in that hospital that I have come to both love and hate.
I hate the fact that people who can’t afford expensive medical insurance have to suffer in cold surrounds with nurses who are obviously overworked, underpaid and struggling to empathise with their patients’ woes. I also hate the fact that there are only six wheelchairs in the entire hospital, only two of which work properly, crutches with no rubber stoppers on them, which means that they slip on the hospital floor, and most annoyingly of all as a porter, lifts that summarily close while you are wheeling a patient out of them.
What I love about it, though, is that it is real. Everyone there is aware of the problems and tries to work around them as best as possible, offering a service to people whom private hospitals would not even consider letting through their doors.
No one is turned away here, even if you have to wait your turn on a cold bench clutching your gashed open head. I also love the fact that along with the sombre reality of death that I’m forced to confront in a very stark way, I also get to pick up specimens from a ward filled with screaming newborn babies the size of papayas.
I cannot say whether it has made me realise the error of my ways and convinced me that society is right to regard dagga as an illicit substance that needs to be fought on every front.
I realise, as was explained to me by the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders, that there are two main groups of people who end up in the diversion programme as a result of dagga use.
There are those who are more affluent who use it largely as a recreational drug, like South African cricketers, and those who use it as a continual escape from the harsh realities of life in a crime-ridden society where high unemployment makes it difficult to look to anything else for help.
I therefore understand that the argument for legalisation in this country is a far more complex issue than in other more stable societies like The Netherlands.
I do believe, however, that if punishment is to be given for such an individual act, community service is certainly the most appropriate form. I still don’t see myself, or others that choose to partake of the holy herb, as criminals, but community service has made me realise more profoundly the type of society in which we live and the immense problems that we all face in building this into the country that we desire.
It has been a humbling journey and one that I feel the public has a right to demand from those six members of the South African cricket squad, if for no other reason than to truly experience the reality of this country that they purportedly represent every time they step out on to the cricket pitch.