Nadine Dirks (the former Liesbeek Action Campaign media officer) recently published her first novel titled Hot Water.
Nadine Dirks – 7 February 2024
The South African context of a faulty public healthcare system, apartheid spatial planning and class and race divides breeds a strange state of being. Either we endure suffering silently, escaping into another world in order to survive the torment, or we advocate for ourselves and others. Both of these methods form from a sense of helplessness and self-preservation — it is a case of do or die.
My experiences of the public healthcare system as a young girl in the townships forced me into advocacy early in my teens because I watched healthcare providers disregard and mistreat people who they deemed guilty of causing their own suffering. I watched nurses separate patients into categories: people with HIV or Aids and the others…