It feels like all the best people are leaving

There’s that one family in your circle of friends and acquaintances. She’s class mom, he’s the kind of guy pulling the 2am to 5am shift in the neighbourhood watch. When there’s fundraising to be done, their names are scribbled on the first stub in your raffle ticket book. They share photos on Facebook of their kids sorting through old toys to donate to the local place of safety.

You kind of hate them a little, they’ve got their shit so very, very together. Until you’re manning the boerie roll table side by side at the school sports day, and it turns out that she’s actually sweetly insecure, uses the word “fuck” more often than you and keeps asking you questions about your life instead of talking about herself constantly.

And now, just as you become accustomed to having these pillars of the community in your corner, they’re packing up and leaving. To Australia, to New Zealand, to the UK.

And it worries me.

As a family with a disabled child, we don’t have the option to live anywhere other than the country of his birth — South Africa. On paper, Travis is considered too much of a burden on the healthcare system of any country we might want to move to (although his health is excellent), and so we stay here.

I will admit that South Africa’s natural beauty is something special. More often these days I rant about the ever-depreciating value of the Rand, and what that means for me as a business-owner. Then there’s the brow-furrowing problem of the falling standard of education; fingers crossed I’ve solved it by sending my two other sons to the best private schools we can afford. Crime? So far, our family is relatively untouched by violence.

Just because we stay doesn’t mean I’m patriotic; it just doesn’t make sense to me to be patriotic when we live in a global village.

I’d like to think that if our family ever received the opportunity to leave South Africa it would be because: “Adventure is out there!” and not because I think we live in a shithole.

But I can’t ignore this new wave of emigrants.

It started towards the end of last year, and it feels like every month someone new, someone I consider one of the shiny, happy people, is inviting me to a secret Facebook page where they are selling their belongings.

I always buy something.

This is not the “brain drain”. This is something else. It’s something more vital that’s leaking out of our borders. The cheerleaders are leaving. The lynchpins of the community. The organisers of bake sales and book clubs.

When they leave, it’s not with a flurry of angry posts on social media where they rip South Africa a new one, and yell “‘Sayonara, suckers” as they board their plane. No, they leave quietly, reluctantly, like they’re almost embarrassed to have thrown in the towel.

And after they’ve gone, I feel like my life I have built here is poorer for it.