Johannesburg - For foreigners who escaped the xenophobic violence in Germiston last week, it has been six days of living in a refugee camp with no idea of what to do next.
Since Thursday, hundreds of men, women and children, including about 100 babies, from the Makause and Marathon informal settlements have been staying in tents in a fenced-off square of grass in the Germiston suburb of Primrose. Across the street, the Primrose Methodist Church handed out donated food and blankets.
Inside the camp, youngsters played soccer and mothers nursed their babies while hanging clothing onto the barbed wire fences.
The refugees are from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. Some have been in South Africa just a few months. Others arrived in the country seven years ago - just as the last wave of xenophobic violence in the country had calmed down.
The Ekurhuleni metro, which manages the camp, has set up a mobile clinic inside where foreigners can get medical treatment.
Red Cross worker Glen Muvhali said some refugees leave the camp during the day to go to work. But others have stayed put out of fear, going out only to get a meal from the church or the Red Cross.
On Tuesday, some of the refugees told The Star they felt safer in the camp than they did in the informal settlements, but after hearing rumours that tension had subsided, they want to return to their homes.
Many said they wanted to return to their original countries.
“If we had known this would happen, we wouldn’t come (to South Africa),” said a 40-year-old man who asked not to be named, fearing for his safety.
He came to the country from Zimbabwe three months ago, hoping to find a job and to better his living conditions.
Since then he has been doing piece work as a carpenter. “We were expecting to just get a job… We fear being victimised,” he said.
“My family (in Zimbabwe) just phoned me, they were crying.”
He fled his home in the Marathon settlement last week after hearing quarrels and gunshots, and seeing people being beaten.
He brought a bag of clothes to the camp but left everything else at home.
Another man in his tent, a 34-year-old Zimbabwean who left the Makause settlement, brought nothing with him.
Nearby, Luressia Makovela, a Mozambican who arrived in South Africa five years ago, was braiding her relative Alice Theimi’s hair outside their tent.
The tent houses nine adults and six children.
“We sit the whole day,” Makovela said in Zulu.
She said street vendors were too afraid to go out of the camp to sell their goods.
Makovela and Theimi said that in their settlement, people had thrown stones at them in the street, asking them which country they were from.
They did not know how much longer they would be staying in the camp, which they said was cold at night.
Municipal representatives had come to write down their names, they said, and they hoped they would be able to return to the Marathon settlement soon.