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At a township in Durban, April 15, 2022. PHILL MAGAKOE / AFP
Spiwe Mtseko navigates through sodden sandbanks like an archaeologist. “There used to be houses here,” he says as he walks through the damp ruins of Mega Village, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa. Located near a river, the shanty town has been hit hard by bad weather which has left more than 440 dead and 40,000 displaced in the past week in this region of Kwazulu-Natal which opens onto the Indian Ocean.
The river that engulfed the little town retreated a hundred yards down. According to Spiwe Mtseko, an unemployed father who represents residents in the district, 300 houses were destroyed at a glance. They live in barracks, as these small huts made of corrugated iron are called. The rudimentary appearance of the exterior sometimes hides pretty and comfortable interiors. Shiny engineered hardwood floors, microwave, fridge with icemaker, picture hanging on the wall, and flat screen TV: Milton Sibiya’s cabin was the cocoon of a working life.
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“See how much I’ve lost? ‘ he exclaims, scrolling through the photos on his phone. “If I don’t talk nonsense, we’re getting closer to 100,000 rand” (6,000 euros), he laments. Feet in flip-flops and a shovel in hand, Milton clears the mud from the double floor. It is protected from the rain by a metal sheet that is still standing. His house was gutted. Tonight he can spend the night in the community room that was set up for the victims of the disaster upstream of the district, in one of the dormitories, these collective accommodations with a shared kitchen and toilets, where the poorest sections of the population traditionally live.
single meal
In the Durban area, authorities have opened 17 shelters such as Tehuis Hostel. The latter, built in the early 1980s, has 4,000 beds and is already overcrowded. That is why the displaced people of Mega Village found shelter not in rooms but in a dormitory without beds. “We can’t ask them to leave,” explains Sonwabile Spamla, the hostel’s tenants’ representative. We are waiting for the city to come and help them. But it is dangerous for them to go back there. »
A hundred women and children crowd into a low-ceilinged room. The men live separately for safety reasons. The light hardly penetrates and the air circulates little. Only the luckiest have a mattress, the others sleep on the polished concrete floor. A woman is coughing in a corner of the room. Fundisiwe Mbili, 28, has a sinus problem. “It’s cold, when I wake up I have a stuffy nose. But I have no choice, I have to sleep here. she trusts. On her escape she was only able to snatch a blanket from the river, which she has to share with her son, her mother and her two little sisters.
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