Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A monster steals people’s lives and homes in a flash
SITTING in his donated Gift of the Givers house upstream of the Jukskei River in Johannesburg, Welcome “Rasta” Mahlalela knew the torrential floodwaters were coming by the terrifying sound in the distance.
He had heard it many times before. He knew what it meant: his neighbours were about to lose everything. As his family did in 2013.
“It was a sound like WHOOOOOSH. You can’t explain it,” said Mahlalela, standing on the ruined, broken banks of the murky river in Setswetla, Alexandra.
To Mahlalela, it sounded monstrous. That monster would snatch Cynthia Chauke’s three-year-old daughter, Everite, from her, too. It’s now been more than a week since she was swept away by the river. Chauke holds her hands to her face and sobs quietly, as she sits in the Gift of the Givers housing village, dejected.
The child’s father, Shadrack, had held on to Cynthia and Everite as they sought refuge in a tree to escape the waters that swallowed their shack. “I just want my daughter’s body, even if it’s just a finger to bury her,” she said, explaining that rescue teams had dived as far as the Hartbeespoort Dam to recover her remains.
“We just need something to give us closure. My husband can’t forgive himself for letting our daughter go.”
As Mahlalela trudged along the banks of the Jukskei, he pointed to the debris of homes and dreams lying everywhere. “There was no place for anyone to go. The river was up to the roof of people’s homes. People just ran for their lives.”
He moved to Setswetla in 1993, and remembers when the river was small. “It was a little river, a little stream. You could jump across it. Now it’s a big river that washes our lives away. It grows gradually every year. It used to be far from the people.
“The government needs to put a barricade here so no one else can put their shacks here.”
There used to be an alarm that would warn residents about an impending flood, but it was vandalised a decade ago, he explained.
On Tuesday, President Jacob Zuma toured the desolate community and promised the government would make the river safer, but local resident Mlingani Mnisi was too busy trying to find clothes to wear. Standing in an old tattered pair of shorts in his flooded yard, he described how his life had fallen apart. “Every day, I look to the skies and worry about my future here. There is nowhere else for us to go.”
In 2013, Gift of the Givers built a model housing village where Mahlalela and nearly 80 other flood victims were relocated. Dubbed Project Higher Ground, it has become a refuge for the community. Here, he works as a manager and lives now with his family.
“This project started because of flooding in Alex and it’s become a community project,” said Emily Thomas, the national project manager of the Gift of the Givers.
“It’s safe and cordoned off. People are supposed to live until they find RDP houses but no one has left since 2013. The people who are living here year after year will tell you they go through the same story of flooding.
“A lot can tell you the fear they had for their children. They leave their kids at home, and once they move here to our village, they fetch them.”
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