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PAULA SLIER

PAULA SLIER

About paula

Journalism Found me

Sometimes the places we dream about become the places that shape us

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“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s merely wires and lights in a box.”

- American broadcast journalist,
Edward R. Murrow

I began my journalism career at the South African Broadcasting Corporation and eventually became a senior reporter and news anchor.

My beat was the Constitutional Court, but I covered everything—from politics and elections to breaking news, human-interest features, and the unfolding transformation of the new South Africa. Beyond the headlines, though, the stories that have stayed with me most were always the stories about people.

One of those people was Paseka Moahlodi.

He was a homeless teenager living on the streets and sleeping in a shelter while studying for his final school exams. I found him quite by chance. On the day South Africa’s final school-leaving exam results were published, we sat together on dustbins on a pavement, for a live morning breakfast interview. I handed him that morning’s newspaper which listed listed only people who had passed. I wouldn’t let him look at it beforehand and, while live on air, he searched desperately for his name. He couldn’t find it. I

Another person I'll never forget was Gavin Mpasa.

I met him one freezing cold winter’s night in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, while reporting on South Africa’s homeless population during the national census. I saw him when we were walking back to the car, his worldly belongings in a black dustbin bag next to the newspapers he slept on to keep warm. When I asked him how it felt to be interviewed, he answered: “The fact that we’re being counted makes us feel like human beings.”
 

started to panic, took the newspaper, looked again, and there it was.

He’d passed.

He jumped up shouting, “I’ve passed! I’ve passed!”

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation saw the interview and offered him a three-year university bursary. Last I heard, Paseka was running his own marketing company in Cape Town. 
 
It was a reminder that journalism doesn’t just tell stories. Sometimes, it changes lives. 
His mother, in Cape Town, saw the interview and contacted the SABC. They had lost contact years before. We were able to reunite him with his family and arrange for him to fly home.
 
A few months later, his sister phoned  to tell me Gavin had died from pneumonia he had contracted while living on the streets. When I started crying, she stopped me. “Please don’t cry,” she said. “Don’t you realise? He died surrounded by his family. That was the greatest gift we could have given him.”