Durban - A mother has told of her heartache after her 10-year-old twins drowned in an uMlazi river at the weekend.
The children had been collecting bottle tops for a school competition when tragedy struck.
Brother and sister, Zamo and Zama Mendu, had left home in E-Section with another child to collect the tops, near the Mfongosi River, when they slipped down an embankment and fell into it, said their mother, Fikile Mendu, 38.
The twins, Grade 4 pupils at Manzolwandle Primary School in the south Durban township, drowned. The competition was to win a computer tablet.
KwaZulu-Natal Emergency Medical Service spokesman, Robert McKenzie, said the third child, a 9-year-old boy, managed to swim to safety.
“The boy was stabilised at the scene before being taken to a nearby health facility.”
Mendu said she had been at home when the incident happened.
“hey knocked on the door and asked if I was the mother of Zama and Zamo, and told me that I must come with them. They didn’t explain anything.”
She said when they got to the river she saw the bodies of her children lying there. Mendu said she initially did not want to believe her children were dead.
“I only started to believe when they were putting them into the mortuary van. It is painful, it is really painful.”
Mendu said her remaining child, a 24-year-old daughter, was finding it difficult to accept what had happened.
She described her children as being good and loved by everyone in the community.
Mendu said the children had been close and did everything together.
She said they had been living with their grandmother in Port Shepstone until she died in January, when they moved to uMlazi to live with her.
Mendu said the children would be buried in Port Shepstone on Sunday.
Police spokesman, Major Shooz Magudulela, said an inquest docket had been opened.
Daily News