The Real Jenty

Some of the comments from my post yesterday about leashing Connor when shopping reminded me of a story I got told at a kids party the other day, and also reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about it yet. This is a true dinkum story even though I haven’t heard about it in the news… a friend’s husband got told the saga at a local policing forum.

This used to happen a few years ago in this country, and I haven’t heard this kind of thing happening in a few years, but apparently the cops are very worried about the increase in child trafficking in anticipation of the World Cup next year.

Anyhoo, this is what happened a few weeks ago in a major shopping mall close to where I live in Johannesburg.

A mom was shopping in a large department store with her 3 year old little boy.  Boy was running around while she was browsing and looking at things on shelves.  She turns around to look for him, but couldn’t find him anywhere.

The mom went to the tills and the manager got called, and he had the sense to lock the store down to look for the child. They apparently closed the front doors and back doors stopping staff from leaving too.

After searching the entire store, the child was eventually found… and where you may ask…

… in the staff toilets in the back of the store.  He was found on the floor of a loo, drugged, hair shaven off and in different clothes already!  He was ready to be removed.

Absolutely FRIGHTENING! I’ve heard stories like that before, but kinda thought it might be an urban legend… but clearly it’s not.

And so, even more reason for me to leash Connor to stop him from running off!

A colleague is going through a really scary thing at the moment.  In fact, if it were me, I’m would be in the loony bin by now… that would be the last straw.

On Monday he got an SMS from Vodacom to say that he’d upgraded his mobile contract. That was a surprise to him, so he phoned Vodacom to find out more about, only to discover that he’d apparently upgraded his contract in Cape Town (he was in JHB the entire time) over the weekend and got a new phone and a R1000 voucher!

Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, it seems that someone in Cape Town presented his ID book, and got the phone and voucher and upgraded his contract to a Talk 1000!! Scary shit!

Then he decided to phone a few of the companies that he had accounts with.  He discovered half an hour later after talking to Truworths, that he’d apparently opened an account at Identity on Saturday in Cape Town, and spent R2000 on the account.  Same scenario… someone presented his ID and an account was opened.

It turns out that someone has an ID book with his details in it, with a different issue date and photo… in Cape Town… and that person has merrily opened accounts in his name!!

What a mission!  This poor guy! He’s had to get affidavits etc to the companies to get this sorted out… which it still hasn’t been.  Poor dude is living through his worst nightmare.  How do you get these people to stop?  If you get your ID listed as suspect, do they use the issue date too?  Thankfully he now has a copy of the ID they’re using, Identity sent him a copy of it.  If you do get it marked, can you get a new ID from home Affairs?  If so, you’d have to prove who you are… he doesn’t have a birth certificate anymore!! It just gets worse, when you think of the ramifications of this.

It’s completely freaked me out too.  Hope this never ever happens to me!

I saw something a little disturbing on the way to the  shops yesterday.  In one sense, I could completely understand how angry the mother must have been, but the rest of me felt very very sad for her poor son.

I was travelling the car with the kids.  We were going on a busy road, when I saw a car stopped on the side of the road.

A woman got out the car and ran around to the back door on the passenger side of the vehicle.  She opened the door and yanked her son out.  He must’ve been about 7 or 8 years old, and he landed on the floor and kicked her.  She didn’t say a word to him, then slammed the door shut, ran around the car again and jumped into the drivers seat and turned the car on.

And then I couldn’t see any more.  I wonder whether she actually drove off without him.  If she did, she couldn’t have gotten far, because he wasn’t there when I went back home that way 15 minutes later.

Can you imagine how scared that boy was?

I think that must’ve been a very scary experience even if his mother had allowed him back into the car before driving off… let alone if she’d actually left him there.

And before you say why didn’t you stop… I had the kids in the car and didn’t want them to be influenced by her crazy antics. If he was on the road when we came home, I would’ve picked him up.

This has got me thinking… that mother has no idea how much damage she’s doing to him.  He’s going to grow up thinking that it’s OK to get angry enough to leave a loved one on the side of the road… and that’s never OK.

It made me wonder whether a guy I knew a long time ago had a similar experience when he was younger.  Let me elaborate.

One evening, long time ago, a friend and I met 2 guys in a bar.  I had a fling with the one guy, she ended up having a fling with the other guy.  My fling ended quite quickly… as my relationships tended to during that time , but she saw this guy for a while.  And he ended up being quite a scary and scaly character.

A few months later, she bumped into his next girlfriend in a club, and she asked how he was doing.  This woman told my friend, that they ended up fighting quite hectically, and one night, he got so angry with her, that he stopped on the highway (in the middle of the night), threw her out the car and just left her there!! She didn’t have a cell phone or anything, and had to find her way home… and she hadn’t seen him since.

Scary shit! So lady in the car… if by chance you’re reading this blog… just careful what you’re teaching your son!!

Our study is upstairs, and I can kind of see the back of our one neighbours house over the wall.  Our garden is quite big, so we’re not living on top of our neighbours, but the trees aren’t quite high enough yet to block their kitchen windows and door from our view.

Last night, I was sitting at the PC blogging and twittering away when I hear shouting and their child shouting and crying (they have a little girl that must be about 3 years old).

Now I don’t often hear shouting from the house, but the child crying is not big news… kids cry!  That’s what they do… but what happened next was not normal by any account.

Then I hear the child screaming.  It was blood curdling.

So I open the curtains and look to see whether I can see anyone.  It was pitch dark in the house and garden.  Only a few upstairs lights were on.  And the screaming continues.

The “mother” must have noticed me watching, because the kitchen lights then came on, and the door opened.  She THEN LET THE CHILD INSIDE!!!

You could have blown me over with a feather!! What kind of “mother” leaves a 3 year old outside in the middle of the night and switches all the lights off???!?!?!?

That poor child.

Of course, I tweeted about it, and Graeme responded saying I should phone the police.  I suppose if we lived in another country that would be an option, but I seriously don’t believe they would do anything about it.

But what I promise I’m going to do… is keep a watching eye on their house.  If this happens again, I swear I’ll go outside and give her a mouthful or something.  There’s absolutely NO excuse for that in my mind.  It’s child abuse.  If your child was making you so mad, give her time out in the bathroom or something! You DON’T leave them alone in the dark… especially not outside the house!

I actually feel sick even thinking about it.

I realised at a traffic light this morning, that I’d yet again forgotten to lock my car doors after dropping the kids off. And it got me thinking that I’m a bit strange…

I generally only realise that my car doors are unlocked when I’ve stopped at a traffic light and there are people loitering close by.

So what do I do… I wait until the hawker or beggar or whom ever walks away, before I lock the doors.

Weird hey? You would think that I would lock immediately, but no, I feel embarrassed to do it with them right there. It’s an admission that I distrust them, and I think that’s rude.

So instead, I risk a smash and grab, and I would rather watch them until they’re far enough away from the car for them not to hear the car locking.

LOL! I know… I’m strange.

… it was AK47′s afterall!
A friend sent us an email with an extract to an Afrikaans newspaper with the story
A shopping centre very close to us was held up by 20 armed men. No wonder there was a lot of shots!!
From the sounds of it, the shots we heard were those fired when the perps ran away seemingly along the river area.

Here’s a link to the article... it’s in Afrikaans only I’m afraid

Last night Lance and I woke up to the sounds of gunshots.

Before all you non-SA people lift your eyebrows… it doesn’t happen often in my neighbourhood… which is why we woke up.

Last night, however, it sounded closer than I’ve ever heard them.  First we heard screaming.  Then we heard shots.  It was definitely from 2 different guns, they sounded very different.  And it must’ve been very close for us to have heard the screams.  And then the shots were on the move… the sounds came closer to our house… and then further away.

Lance and I were chatting about it this morning and we both feel that the strangest thing of all was that there were no police sirens AT ALL!  Weird.

They must’ve been called by people living closer to the noise.  But who knows if they ever arrived?!  I suppose I’ll have to wait for the next email from the neighbourhood watch people to see wha was going on.  If it had happened closer to us, we would have phoned the neighbourhood security and the police but we didn’t because we had no idea where the sound was coming from and we weren’t going to take a chance and go looking for it (but nothing and no-one came down our road).

My MIL phoned this afternoon though, to tell us that a friend of hers heard on the radio that there was a shootout last night in our area with AK47′s, but I can’t find any news on the net about it.

Very strange.  And so tonight, our garden alarm beams went on extra early and Lance says he’s not going to sleep well (I always sleep well ).

A few weeks ago I posted about the car guards in a local shopping centre who asked me where the boys were, when I went shopping alone on that day.

Well, this week, as I came out of the Woolies and as I was putting Connor into his carseat, I overheard the car guard talking to his boss.

First let me explain, these car guards only get paid with tips.  But they are organised by someone, and they normally have to pay that person either a percentage of what they get, or a fixed value per day in order to work that area.

I could understand their conversation because they were talking in English, this is a bit unusual, but the car guard actually sounded like a Zimbabwean to me.  So the English does make sense.

Anyhoo, the car guard dude had a little book out, and he was telling the boss-man about a guy who comes to the centre almost every day, and every time he comes he’s in a different car!  He described the guy in a lot of detail, and he even had all the details of quite a few of the cars this dude was driving.

I really hope the boss-man does something constructive with the information, and I’m quite thrilled that these guys actually do try and make a difference and it was proven to me that evening.  They get a lot of flack from people who say that they make no difference to the crime and they’re just a nuisance… but clearly… in this case… those people are wrong!

It reminded me though, about some neighbours living across the road from us in the first townhouse that we lived in.  These people always had different cars and we could never figure them out.  When they moved out, another couple moved in and we became good friends.  Over dinner one night, we were telling them about the car thing, and Andre then told us that just after they moved in there was a problem with the geyser.  When he got into the roof to see if he could sort it out, he found piles of paper hidden there.  The papers were all legal documents for cars!! So it seems we’d been living across the street from a car syndicate and we had no idea!! LOL!

Beauty told me a few stories on Friday that literally made my hair stand on ends.  It’s been bugging me since then, so I just have to share my distress.

I mentioned last year, that Beauty has a little sister who had a baby.  She stays with Beauty, and Beauty insisted that she went back to school to finish her studies after the baby was born.  She did her matric last year (final school year).

However… Beauty discovered last week that her sister fell pregnant again. While she was writing her finals last year she was pregnant. And then she had an abortion apparently when she was about 2 months pregnant.  She’d asked a friend of hers where to go, because that friend has had a few abortions and knew where to go… nice contraception method… but that’s not the point of this story.

And that friend was the person who eventually told Beauty.  As you can imagine Beauty is livid, in fact, she’s told her sister to leave the house now and she has to now live with her new boyfriend (not the father of the first child – who is now living with the father’s granny in the Eastern Cape).

What she also told Beauty, was that something went wrong during the abortion, and that her sister collapsed, and the doctor apparently asked the friend to call the family… and her sister refused and told the doctor that the family wasn’t around.  Nice!  Luckily for her sister, it all ended ok because she seems to be fine now.

Anyhoo, Beauty went on to tell me that one of the abortions that this friend has had… was done when she was 7 months pregnant!! OMG!  That blew my mind.  She was told to take a pill… and then the baby was born dead.  Nice!  That’s not just highly illegal… that’s murder!!

The fact that there are people in Jo’burg that will readily take money from these girls and then kill their babies makes me so mad!!  There are legal abortion clinics all over the place… but they’re obviously working above the law and will abide by the abortion timelines… but these back-street clinics just blow my mind.  I actually didn’t know that they were still around.  The whole purpose of legallising abortion was to stop this kind of thing from happening.

Then the story got worse.  Beauty then told me about her one neighbour who was cheating on her husband and fell pregnant 2 years ago.  She apparently knew that when the baby was born he was going to figure out that the baby wasn’t his.  So at 8 months pregnant she went to an abortion clinic.  They gave her a pill.  From the sounds of what happened, it sounds like it was a pill to bring on labour.

The neighbour then went into labour one night, and locked herself into the bathroom.  When the husband got into the bathroom he found his wife lying on the floor with the baby in a plastic bag in front of her.  He then called Beauty to help, also because he didn’t want to be accused of anything.  She insisted that the police get called… but they took so long to get there that they eventually called the ambulance because by then she had passed out.  And guess what…  NOTHING happened to her!! NOTHING!! She killed her baby for God sake, and NOTHING happened!

It blows my mind.

This is also related to crime actually, it’s playing on my mind a bit (crime, that is).

I get regular emails from our community policing forum informing the community about crime in the area and what to look out for etc.  It’s normally quite depressing to read, no, I lie, it’s always depressing to read.

Anyway, I got an email from them a few days ago saying that there was another house break in the area last Saturday and that they could now confirm that the perpetrators were driving a white bakkie (like a truck).  This particular vehicle has been linked to a number of break-ins recently, especially during the day and once they get into the house they tie the domestic worker up  (maid), and then ransack the place. Anyhoo, in this email, they said that all residents must be warned to be on the lookout, and that the bakkie is being driven by a white man and a black man.

Yesterday morning, I told Beauty this story (the domestic worker that looks after Connor during the day).  And told her to be careful etc etc.

The thing about this story is that it’s damn easy for a white guy to gain access to a property if he’s in a bakkie.  All he has to do is pretend that he’s a plumber or electrician etc, and because he has a black “helper” too, domestics who don’t know better will let them in!! 

What I found funny was that we both had such different opinions about this bakkie.  I felt/feel that the white guy is the one organising the whole thing and the black dude is there to help out.  She immediately said that she thought the black guy was organising the whole thing to make it easier to gain access, and hired the white guy!

LOL!  It’s so funny how differently we view life.