Loadshedding and Getting Scammed

After I spent some time around noon at a local university and getting a personalized tour by two professors, one of whom I was sharing food with at my uncle's dinner table in Berlin just four weeks earlier, I headed off into the city to run some errands. The visit to the Uni got cut short because the power went out and everything went dark.

I went to a local laboratory for some tests to monitor my health, where we struggled a lot with getting the payment through during a scheduled power outage called loadshedding.

South Africa struggles a lot with energy security, so the national energy provider shuts off the power in each district in multiple two hour blocks per day. It's super annoying, negatively impacts everything, and loathed by South Africans because it is all happening because of governmental negligence, sabotage, and corruption. Experts don't expect the situation to improve anytime soon, so some tensions are brewing.

Since we are heading to some wetter areas soon, with a risk of malaria infections from the dangerous Anopheles mosquitos, I decided to get some Malaria medicine in a pharmacy. Just outside it is where I met a guy - Leeroy Charles Benjamin he said. He was a man who told me he lived in a township - entire city districts constructed primarily of rudimentary materials such as sheet metal - oftentimes without even electricity.

He was telling me his story which was truly tragic. However, there was something off about his story. Too many tragedies befell the poor man. His biggest desire was not for me to give him money or food, but diapers and formula for his one year old baby. I ended up purchasing baby supplies for around 35€ for him.

I read up later that this baby supply scheme is a new type of scam. It can take two different forms. Either the store is in on it and buys it back from the guy immediately after the victim makes the purchase. Or the scammers take these goods they obtained "through donation" and sell them on the street for cheap.

I willingly became a victim of this scam, because I figured that it is better to have baby supplies in circulation than on a store shelf. I figured the store wasn't in on it because it was a large retailer and we were assigned a till at random.

To avoid the loadshedding at home I went to a local coffee shop that was equipped with a generator and spent the remainder of my workday there. Today's tasks were researching castles for rent for my own projects and how to charter private aircraft for one of my clients.Read more