[This is another typical day in South Africa. The blacks need to steal from us. We need to be able to defend ourselves. Seriously. This woman was lucky. But, make no mistake: MOST CRIMES ARE AVERTED BY THE ACTIONS THAT WE WHITES TAKE. IF WE DID NOT TAKE THE SECURITY MEASURES THAT WE DO, CRIME AGAINST US WOULD BE 20x HIGHER THAN IT IS! ITS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL.

Notice the blacks want the cell phone. Whites have been killed for cell phones before. Notice this happened in a small town. The small rural towns can be very dangerous too – not just the big cities. Jan]

‘It happened next to a busy road but no one stopped to help me,’ says Ms Monique van der Merwe, who is lucky to have escaped more serious injuries during her harrowing experience on Wednesday, 21 November.
According to her, she had been walking from her workplace at Skipper to pick up her son from nursery school in Station Street. Just before she reached Station Street, she walked across the vacant lot next to Paul Kruger Street. It was around 15:30 that she suddenly noticed five youths sitting in the shade under a tree.
‘They were not older than 20 and were neatly dressed. They did not look like street children,’ she says. Even so, she immediately got a ‘bad feeling’ about them. She tried to steer clear of them but the youngsters suddenly got up and came towards her with knives.
‘I begged them not to take my cell phone as my whole life is on it,’ she says.
This was the only thing the robbers seemed to want from her, however. Although she put up a fight and started screaming, the juveniles grabbed her phone from the front pocket of her jeans. ‘I did not stop screaming and ran to my child’s pre-school. I only realised I was bleeding when I got there,’ she says.
Upon seeing she had been stabbed, her child’s teacher immediately called the emergency services, who rushed to the scene. They took Van der Merwe to Carletonville Hospital to get stitches for the stab wounds on her right shoulder and the back of her lower arm. She also bruised her right leg in the fight.
She left Carletonville to stay with her family in North West while she was recuperating from her trauma. She only returned to work this week.
According to Van der Merwe, her colleagues, neighbours and friends have made her promise never to walk alone to fetch her son again, but rather let them give her a lift.
‘People do not realise how dangerous our town has become. This happened to me in broad daylight,’ she warns.