Barberton - Shadrack Mdluli slowly flips through photographs of his wife, his eyes fixated on her face.
When he dropped her off at work on February 5 last year, he had no idea that it would be the last time he would see her.
Shortly afterwards, Yvonne Mnisi, Solomon Nyerende and Pretty Nkambule and two others were trapped beneath 10 000 tons of rubble when the container they were working in plunged into a sinkhole.
With a pained look on his face, Mdluli describes the day of the collapse as the most heart-wrenching day of his life.
“What hurt the most was I had just dropped her off at work. About an hour later I received a call and was told the mine had collapsed,” he said.
He immediately called Mnisi but “her phone was off, and I decided to call Solomon, but his phone was off as well.”
The 33-year-old added: “I am still hurt because that’s my wife who is underground. The pain is more bearable now.
I am learning to come to terms with the fact I may never see her alive again.”
“I drove her to work that morning not knowing it would be the last time I would be seeing her. If I knew then what I know now, I would have asked her to stay at home.”
The tragedy has had far-reaching effects on his family. Mdluli has been separated from his two sons, Blesser and Junior. and lost his job shortly after the disaster.
“Things have become terribly bad. Money and food are hard to come by.
"It’s not like before, when we had the
luxury of a stable household income. We have basically been crippled by this,” he said.
Mdluli was one of thousands of mineworkers who lost their jobs when Lily Mine closed down after the collapse.
He had worked at the mine as a scoop operator and along with his wife made a combined monthly income of about R29000. He was employed by Vantage Goldfields for 10 years and Mnisi worked for the company for eight years.
He thought his hardships were over after he had a brief stint at another Vantage Goldfields’ mine but that would prove short-lived.
“I was called in to work at Barbrook Mine in November. We got paid half our salaries because we had started in the middle of the month, but we didn’t get paid in December. We were told that the company didn’t have money, and the mine also closed.”
Mdluli now lives alone after Mnisi’s parents offered to assist him by taking in his sons until he gets back on his feet.
Numerous attempts were made to retrieve the container in which the trio were believed to be trapped, but ther have been unsuccessful.
“I still have hope that the mine and the government will once again try to retrieve the container, but it’s uncertain when they will start on operations again,” he said.