“What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face.” This is the meaning of THUG LIFE. Tupac Shakur stated that the phrase is actually an acronym for “The Hate U Gave Little Infants F*cks Everybody”. I recently read a book called, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The books title was derived from this concept. It is a young adult novel which focuses on the life of Starr, a 16 year old black female in America. It tells the story about her life, how she has to act when she’s at home in “the hood” and when she is at her private high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between these two places is shattered when she is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend by a police officer (Thomas, 2017). One of the prevalent themes of the book is how the oppressive systems that keep minorities from getting ahead feed into the cycle of crime, violence, and poverty that dominates poor communities (Pierre, 2018). The ethical dilemma which I faced during my time in clinicals is the violation of human rights and lack of services which occurs daily and how this will affect the patients in the long term.

Within the clinical setting, you come across people from diverse backgrounds, religions and social standings. Working in the government hospitals, with these different patients, opened my eyes to the poverty within our country, and how this affects the majority of South Africans. One of the patients I saw had burned himself severely on his lower leg, but being from a poor community he was unable to get the treatment he needed immediately. Living within the Cape Flats, in a “Red Zone”, this refers to areas classified as too dangerous for ambulance workers to move about freely, they have to go in with a police escort (Hendricks, 2018), he had difficulty in accessing the resources needed for treatment, therefore he ended up needing an above the knee amputation as the wound went septic. Had this patient been able to access the resources needed, he would have been able to save his leg. According to our constitution and the Bill of rights everyone has the right to have access to ­health care services (“Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 – Chapter 2: Bill of Rights | South African Government”, 2019).  Before the injury and amputation, the patient worked as a labourer part time, finding odd jobs where he could. This is where the main theme in the book about poverty comes in, and how the cycle will just keep repeating itself as the patient will no longer be able to do hard manual labour. Thus, contributing to the unemployment within our country and having another person not being able to make it out of that poverty cycle.

We can interpret what Tupac was saying about, “What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face.” as children being uneducated about the spread of diseases, growing up, contracting a disease then spreading it, and repeating the cycle all over again. An example of this is the spread of HIV/AIDS as many of the patients admitted to hospital are RVD+. “The estimated overall HIV prevalence rate is approximately 13,1% among the South African population. The total number of people living with HIV is estimated at approximately 7,52 million in 2018. For adults aged 15–49 years, an estimated 19,0% of the population is HIV positive” (Statistics, 2018). Being ill and unable to get better could play into being unemployed and needing to receive a grant from the government to help sustain you and your family. This does not help the economy to grow, and therefore keeping the poverty cycle going.

Reading “The Hate U Give”, and then working in a government clinical setting, I could see the connection the author was trying to make between growing up poor, surrounded by crime and violence and lacking the resources needed within that community, how the poverty cycle bleeds into the decisions made by adults and how this can affect our economy, letting the cycle carry on and repeat itself. As a health professional, working within this setting we cannot break this cycle, but perhaps we could be part of a system which tries to better our patients by educating them and returning them to their highest level of function so that they may attempt to break it themselves. Lucius Annaeus Seneca said, “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage”.

References

Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 – Chapter 2: Bill of Rights | South African    Government. (2019). Retrieved 18 August 2019, from https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter-2-bill-rights

Hendricks, A. (2018, August 15). Paramedics seen as soft targets by criminals on the Cape Flats. Retrieved August 25, 2019, from GroundUp: https://www.groundup.org.za/article/paramedics-seen-soft-targets-criminals-cape-flats/

Lucius Annaeus Seneca Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved September 13, 2019, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lucius_annaeus_seneca_10471

Pierre, M. (2018, October 28). The Story Behind The Hate U Give’s Title Is as Powerful as the Film. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from POPSUGAR: https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Meaning-Behind-Hate-U-Give-Movie-Title-45400884

Statistics, S. A. (2018). Mid-year population estimates. Pretoria.

Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. Great Britain: Walker Books Ltd.