On 18 July, thousands of us pull on a branded T-shirt, drive out to a school somewhere on the Cape Flats, paint a wall, ladle soup into polystyrene cups, take the photograph and drive home again. The wall needed painting. The soup was hot, and the children were glad of it. The photograph is not a crime.
But by Monday morning the T-shirt is in the wash, the caterers have collected their urns, and the Grade 8 learner we handed that cup to is back in a class of forty-five, carrying whatever she was carrying on Friday. The wall is a lovely colour now. She has not changed.
Nelson Mandela said that what counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. The measure, he went on, is the difference we have made to the lives of others. Notice the tense. Not the difference we made on one afternoon in July. The difference our living made.
Sixty-seven minutes is the easy part.
What service actually is
Service is the ordinary use of what you already have, your time, your attention, your position, your knowledge, for someone whose life it improves and who cannot pay you back. Like a fruit tree never eats its own fruit. It stands in the yard producing something it has no use for itself, and that is the entire point of it. Our abilities work the same way. They reach their purpose at the moment they become useful to somebody else.
This is not a borrowed idea. It is ours. Lovemore Mbigi, in Ubuntu: The African Dream in Management, builds his account of Ubuntu on an old proverb: a thumb, however strong, cannot kill aphids on its own. It needs the other fingers. That is not a sentimental picture of community. It is a hard claim about capability. There are things you cannot do alone no matter how gifted you are, and raising a generation is one of them.
We tend to reach for Ubuntu at funerals and in speeches. Mandela reached for it at a negotiating table.
What it actually feels like
Here is the part the T-shirt photographs never show, and the part I think we owe each other honestly.
- It is mostly boring. Real service is not the dramatic rescue. It is the third Wednesday in a row that you sit with the same child and go over the same work, and he still does not have it. It is the WhatsApp group that will not stop pinging. It is arriving at the hall at half past two and setting out chairs, because someone has to set out the chairs. Glamour is what service looks like from outside. From inside it looks like admin.
- It is frequently awkward. You will say the wrong thing. You will offer help in a way that lands as pity, and you will see it land, and you will wish you had kept quiet. You will find out that the family you thought needed food actually needed a lift to the clinic, and that they were too proud to say so. Serving people means being clumsy in public, repeatedly, and carrying on anyway.
- You usually do not see the result. This is the hardest part for anyone who likes finishing things. A teacher in Mitchells Plain plants something in a fourteen-year-old and finds out twenty years later, in a queue at Shoprite, when a grown man says her name, and she cannot place his face. Most of the time she never finds out at all. Service pays out like a fixed deposit with no statements. You put it in, and you take it on trust that it is compounding somewhere out of sight.
- It costs something real. Not spare change and not spare time, because almost nobody has spare time. It costs the evening you wanted, the money you had earmarked, the emotional reserve you were saving for your own family. Anyone who tells you service is free is describing a photo opportunity. Mandela did not give 67 minutes. He gave 27 years of his life, his marriage, his health and the childhoods of his children, and he was not always sure it would be worth it.
- And it changes you before it changes anything else. This is the surprise. You go in to fix a situation, and you come out with a rearranged sense of your own problems. The woman running a soup kitchen in Manenberg will tell you, if you ask her plainly, that she gets more out of it than the people in the queue do. She is not being modest. She is reporting accurately.
Why it matters more than we admit
Two things happen when a person serves, and we usually count only one. The first is obvious. Someone is better off.
The second is what happens inside the person doing the serving. Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton, in work published in Science in 2008, found that people who spent money on others reported greater happiness than those who spent the same amount on themselves. Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, points the same way: deliberate acts of kindness lift the wellbeing of the giver, and lift it further when the acts vary rather than harden into routine.
For an adolescent, that second effect is the important one. A Grade 8 learner who discovers she can make an adult’s day lighter, or a younger child’s week easier, has learned something no assembly can teach her. She is not a problem to be managed. She has weight. And a young person who knows she has weight is far harder to sell a counterfeit version of the same feeling. That is the quiet economics of it. Service is not a luxury we add once a child is doing well. It is one of the things that makes a child do well.
How it is built
Not in grand gestures. In repetition. Children rarely become what they are told. They become what they repeatedly observe. That single sentence should reorganise how most of us think about our influence, because it shifts the burden off our advice and onto our habits.
So a teacher who greets learners by name in the corridor is teaching service, whatever the lesson plan says. A parent who takes a pot next door in BoKaap and does not mention it at supper is teaching service. A principal who reads out an act of kindness in assembly with the same energy she gives a distinction is telling a whole school what it values. A funder who asks what this built in a person, rather than what this bought, is funding something different.
None of that takes 67 minutes. It takes about 67 seconds, most days of the year.
You cannot give what you do not have.
Here is the part we skip. A young person who does not know who she is, what she values or what she is capable of has very little to give away, and she knows it. Ask her to serve, and she hears one more demand from one more adult. Help her first to know herself, to manage herself and to speak for herself, and service stops being a chore and becomes an expression.
That sequence is not accidental. It is why the Rudder4Success Framework runs in the order it does: Knowing Myself, Guiding Myself, Expressing Myself, and only then Achieving Success. Identity comes before contribution, the way filling comes before pouring. At Rudder4Life, we spend 32 weeks on exactly that sequence, because a young person still trying to prove she matters has no capacity spare to make anybody else matter.
The part we get wrong about Mandela
We have made him a saint, and saints are useless as models because nobody can be one.
He was not born patient. He spent 27 years becoming so. He made compromises that cost him, and there are people on the Cape Flats who will tell you, with reason, that some of those compromises cost them more. He was an ordinary man who kept choosing other people over himself, on days when nobody was watching, when it was boring, when it was awkward, and when there was nothing in it for him. That is the version worth copying. Not the statue. The habit.
Three questions before July ends
- Who served you in a way that changed your direction, and have you ever told them?
- What do you already have, not what do you wish you had, that somebody near you needs this week?
- Does your school, your home or your organisation treat service as an event or as a character?
The measure of a life will never be what we accumulated. It will be who stood taller because we were there. Sixty-seven minutes is where it starts. It was never meant to be where it ends.
#MandelaMonth #67Minutes #Ubuntu #ServiceLeadership #YouthDevelopment #CapeTown #SEL #WholeChild #Grade8 #EducationSA #Rudder4Life