About SACONTACT
Diaspora
During the last ten years the world has effectively become a smaller place for an ever growing number of South Africans of all persuasions. According to recent statistics as many as one million or more of us have already become scattered throughout the world. The largest expat centres include the UK with an estimated 500 000 or more, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA… but there are also sizeable numbers in most countries of the world, ranging from Iraq to Russia and Namibia to the Netherlands.
Like changing clothes
With this worldwide Diaspora it is becoming more and more difficult to keep track of family members, some families have already become dispersed over three or more continents. Not even to mention other relatives, friends, former colleagues, etcetera. Due to the fact that most of us expats are highly mobile we furthermore change countries, addresses and telephone numbers like other people change clothes, not even talking of cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc. Every time you get a new one it is becoming more and more of an effort to try and keep everybody up to date with your new contact particulars… or hope that the grapevine will eventually do this task for you. It is no wonder that more and more people are disappearing from your radar… which means you are also disappearing from their radar… and consequently precious friendships and relationships are being lost forever.
Anybody out there?
Furthermore expats often end up in countries or regions where they don’t know anybody else and we all sometimes have the need to make contact with other expats – if only to pick their brains about relocation problems. The first problem is usually to find out whether there are other expats in your area, and where they are. Some larger cities do have expat clubs, but there are huge areas and many countries where none of these exist and it tends to become a lonely existence for an expat if it is difficult to find out if there is “anybody out there” or whether you are all alone. There are certain web sites which allow you to search for “long lost relatives or friends” but as anyone who has tried it will know, it is not as easy as it sounds. We felt it would be better to prevent people from “getting lost” in the first place than to try and track them afterwards.
Contact info on our database
In the light of all these factors we felt there was an urgent need for a database called SACONTACT where all former South Africans – irrespective of where they live, or how long they will live there – can easily register their contact info on our database… and can just as easily change that info – as frequently as they like or need to. Because they will register their own particulars they can ensure that their own data is correct… and do their own corrections if some errors may have slipped in during registration. They can furthermore also decide how much or how little contact info they wish to place on SACONTACT, the least being an e-mail address… the most being full particulars including more than one cellphone/mobile number. Instead of changing your info all over the place you can do so once-off at SACONTACT and the system will do the rest. Expats do however not only need a place to place their contact particulars, they also need a place where they can conduct a specific search for a particular person or a general search for all expats in your country or general region. SACONTACT will also allow you to do this.
Up to date
There are many web sites that try to deliver a free service, but this usually leads to a poor service and an outdated site… this is especially the case with a database like our own where such a system makes it easy to dump info and forget about it… consequently it will mean that the database becomes totally outdated within a period of 12 months. The only way to ensure that every registered subscriber continually updates his own info, which will make the system valuable for every participant, is by charging a nominal annual subscription fee. This will mean that if it is not annually renewed it will be deleted from the system. To ensure both an up to date system as well as making it affordable to everyone who wishes to subscribe a nominal subscription fee of US$5.00 per annum is required per registration. There is no further cost for any changes, searches or whatever.. Payment can be made to Paypal by means of a credit card or a Paypal account.
Other services
Over and above the basic service we will also endeavour to give subscribers as many additional services as possible, which will make SACONTACT a onestop web site. These include the following:
- A way to check the times in different places
- A currency converter
- List of SA Consulates worldwide
- Links to SA media
- Links to SA forums in different countries
- A calendar
- Social events
- Message forum
Welcome to SACONTACT and we hope that you will join us to ensure that we can all KEEP IN CONTACT.