One thing about being the ‘Good News Girly’ at The Debrief is that I never know where a story will take me.
This week, it took me into a conversation about grief. But it was not the kind of human loss we know and understand but the grief that comes with losing a pet.
I sat down with author Dion Chang, who now works as an end-of-life doula for pets.
I did not even know that role or job existed until I spoke to him. But after sitting with him for an hour, I asked myself howcome I never thought about this before.
“This is a calling,” he told me, when we met up in Johannesburg for our interview.
“Very much like a sangoma. You get called, and I heeded mine,” he explained.
Chang explained that as an end of life pet doula, he sits with people in the final moments of their pet’s life and in the immediate aftermath.
“I’ve assisted people before, being in the room, creating a ritual or ceremony to help ease that pain.”
I thought about how we reserve rituals and ceremonies for human loss but but for many people, losing a pet carries the same emotional weight.
Chang explained to me that society reacts differently when pets die but the pain can be the same as human loss.
This is because people are relying more and more on animals for connection.
“Lots of people, particularly younger people, don’t want to have kids. There are declining birth rates globally, ageing populations, and pet ownership is growing,” Chang told me.
It is a shift that is showing up in real ways.
I was shocked when Chang said that in 2023, a major e-commerce retailer recorded more sales of pet prams than baby prams.
This shift has changed the way people relate to pets and have created a boom in the pet economy.
“I can see where the pet economy is going, and the need for people to acknowledge the grief that comes with it and find an outlet.”
So what exactly is a pet doula?
Change says his work sits at the intersection of emotional support, guide, and witness.
So he can’t resolve grief but he can create the structure for it to help people overcome it.
And beyond working with people one on one, he is now launching a pet loss café in Johannesburg.
This is a physical space where people can come together, talk about their pets, and sit with their grief without having to minimise it or explain it away.
And then, in the same week, the story took me into Johannesburg traffic.
Because while some people are learning how to sit with grief, others are just trying to survive the N17.
Somewhere in that stop-start, drivers have started rolling down their windows and playing rock, paper, scissors with the person next to them. A quick round, a small laugh, and then it’s back to moving inch by inch.
We saw it in a viral clip this week, and it stayed with me because it felt very Joburg. We have seen it before in different forms, from coffee sellers weaving through traffic to people holding up CVs, and others hosting concerts, all trying their luck in a moment of standstill.
And speaking of traffic, my next story introduced me to someone tackling a problem much bigger than being stuck on the N17.
Sizuyile Ngcanga, a former Mercedes-Benz engineer, discovered how serious this problem could be during a personal crisis. When his father passed away, it took six hours for help to arrive. Paramedics could not find the house and the mortuary van took even longer. The delay was not because anyone was unprepared, but because the house did not exist on any map.
That moment stayed with him. If something as basic as finding a home could fail when it mattered most, what else was broken?
The solution he built is called Zuza GPS. Instead of relying on street names, it pins every household with exact coordinates. People can enter their section, zone, or unit and anyone can navigate straight to the door, even in areas that have never been mapped before.
Sizuyile did not stop there. The app also allows people to report potholes, broken streetlights, uncollected rubbish, and it even works without mobile network.
Zuza GPS is still in pilot phase in the Eastern Cape and Sizuyile is now raising funds to expand it across South Africa and eventually the continent.
From watching strangers play rock, paper, scissors in traffic to seeing someone build a tool that could save lives, it is clear that people are finding creative ways to deal with the challenges around them.
Do you think this is the kind of innovation South Africa needs?
