I don’t spend all that much time on Facebook, believe it or not. It stresses me out. I keep getting invited to Scrabulous games I don’t want to play, and RSVP to conflicting events, and stalk only the people I really shouldn’t, for my own sanity, be stalking. You know what I mean.

This hiatus began when I lived in South Africa last semester. The Internet is incredibly slow and expensive, and at University of Cape Town, a school of 27,000, only a couple hundred have Facebooks.

So understandably, I was very excited when I found my host brother’s girlfriend had a profile. My host brother was a male model by profession, but that’s another column for another day. Anyway, Ingrid’s profile was cute and Facebook-naïve. She wrote on her own wall to respond to people, had fewer than 50 pictures tagged of her, none from her own albums, and very little information in her profile.

Then I saw her group list. Briefly I will make fun of its other content, and then I will move on to the real issue. Most remarkable: the “Favorite Sex Positions” listed right next to the “Helping Kids with Cancer” group. At least the woman knows what matters. I’m not actually being sarcastic, although the pictures for the sex group are mostly comprised of wooden dolls and cartoons. Ouch.

The first and most startling of her groups, however, is this one: “Im Sick of CRIME in South Africa!!” Let’s discuss. The lack of apostrophe is in the original, by the way.

When I was living there, South Africa was the third most dangerous country in the world, after Iraq and Colombia. Every student apartment was broken into by the end of the semester, and both of my homestays were robbed. Once while I was awake and in my room. South African President Thabo Mbeki avidly denies a crime problem.

He lived down the street from my first homestay, which is the one where I heard intruders outside of my room. He also believes AIDS can be cured by garlic and showers. Again, for another column. Back to Facebook.

The group has 780 members and 146 wall posts. I scanned seven pages before I sighed too loudly to continue, and found one black woman. Just the one. The disclaimer to the group reads thusly: “Please Note: This is not a forum for hate speech, or racism. Crime affects us ALL.”

Thanks, South Africa. I believe you now. Apartheid is dead. For realsies. I get it.

I poke fun, as I often do, but this is truly problematic. Of COURSE you’re sick of crime in South Africa. It happens CONSTANTLY. I would get sick of losing three BMWs to carjackings and having to replace them, too. I mean, my RUGBY gear was in the boot, bru! (Bru is like bra. One thing Leo got right in “Blood Diamond.”)

I’m being too harsh. South Africa has the most liberal constitution in the world right now. Any country that produces Nelson Mandela, Steven Biko, Miriam Makeba and Paul Simon’s best album is OK with me. But white South Africans have seriously got to get their shit together.

The hospital and clinic where I worked had no Afrikaner volunteers at all. The only whites were American exchange students. The only white South African activists I met were evangelicals. No offense, Jesus, but our attention can probably do more good right now on the street.

And no offense, Facebook, but you suck as a way for people to feel good about themselves as helpers of society. This group simply does not count, unless all 780 kids on the list actually write letters to my former neighbor Thabo or sit on the front steps of Parliament and yell a little. Crime in South Africa is bigger than that. The seven pictures this group has should not be of the cars of group members that have been stolen or smashed.

They should be of bulldozed shacks in townships where blacks were literally picked up and dropped into for decades. They should be of shabeens where black and coloured South Africans drink and dance because it’s cheaper and whites stay out of those neighborhoods. The pictures should be of the severe dehydration ward of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital where triplet infants two beds down from me struggled to breathe.

There is an enormous crime problem in South Africa. Thabo Mbeki doesn’t know the extent of it, but neither, I’m willing to bet, do most of the 780 members of the Facebook group dedicated to stopping it.