Xaba to rebuild his life again

WHEN tropical storm Irina hit in 2012, it flattened Shaka Xaba’s makeshift home in the Isipingo Transit Camp informal settlement, south of Durban.

Everything the unemployed man had was destroyed.

Xaba, now 40, has spent the past five years trying to piece his life back together.

Then on Tuesday, violent winds and rain tore through the city again. And, again, Xaba was left destitute.

Yesterday morning, he stood on top of his sodden bed and counted the damage. What little he had managed to collect since 2012 had been reduced to rubbish.

Xaba was inside his home when the storm broke.

“The weather was bad,” he said. He heard the wind first and then he saw it… lifting the edges of the corrugated tin roof above him.

“The next thing I knew, the roof had blown right off,” he said. “And then the windows came crashing in.”

Within moments, the river running alongside the camp burst its banks and flooded his home.

Xaba, who was only in his underwear at the time, could not reach the door.

He climbed up the wall, jumped over it and ran to seek shelter in a nearby hall.

His neighbour, Sphamandla Sithole, thought he was going to die.Their home, too, was badly damaged.

“I told myself it was time… that I was going to see God,” he said.

Sithole lives with his sister and toddler niece. “My sister put the baby on her back and she just ran,” he said.

Nearly 500 people live in the Isipingo Transit Camp, which was meant to be temporary. It was built on a floodplain in 2008 and no one there was unaffected by Tuesday’s storm.

Yesterday, they were all trying to salvage what they could.

They dragged waterlogged mattresses out into the sun and strung their bed linen up on wire to dry.

Small children helped their mothers wash muddied clothes, while men carried couches, fridges and television sets up to higher ground.