Cape Town - A river winding through an idyllic Cape village is believed to be the source of a potentially life-threatening E.coli count found where it flows into the sea at Gordon’s Bay 6km away.
Resident Samuel Coert, 53, has given up trying to clean the Sir Lowry’s Pass River that runs through his Rasta Camp informal settlement home.
“I stopped cleaning that river because whenever I did, it would make me sick,” says Coert.
“When I first came to live here in Sir Lowry’s Village 24 years ago, we were a small group and we could manage the waste.
“But now with more and more people moving in here over the past few years, the toilets can’t cope and everything gets dumped in this river. The people here are making this river a toilet.”
Jane Makundayi, 26, works for a contractor appointed by the City of Cape Town to clean the river, and says she cannot stop working in the water as it is her only source of income.
However, she is eight months pregnant and fears the water she wades through two days a week without any protective gear could harm her baby. “What can I do? I am the sole breadwinner and I have two other children to take care of.”
Cleaners say their haul includes dead animals, soiled nappies, used sanitary towels, spoiled food and buckets full of human waste.
Makundayi said both her children suffered from skin rashes she blamed on the foul water. Pointing at her two colleagues hauling bags of rubbish out of the water, she says: “We are cleaning here now, but when we come back tomorrow it is going to be just like we have never been here.”
Mother-of-five Charlin Pierson, 40, explained why clean-up efforts were futile.
She squints into the morning light, pointing to the large white bucket she keeps on her doorstep which serves as a toilet for her husband and two small daughters. “I am going to wait till they are done cleaning then I am going to empty it in the river.”
Pierson said she and scores of other residents did this each morning.
As she made her way from her shack to the river, her three-year-old daughter Jaylene skipped behind her, her bare feet splashing in grey puddles of water.
Her eyes lit up when she saw other children playing in the river. “She gets sick a lot,” Pierson said of Jaylene. “She plays in the river when I am not watching and she gets sick from it. She has had gastro and diarrhoea a few times already.”
Pierson said she has no option but to use the river to dump waste. “With the elections we were promised many things, like toilets. But today we still sit with nothing, not even bins to throw our dirt in.”
The City of Cape Town said it was doing what it could to improve conditions in the informal settlement.
“The city can confirm that new/additional full-flush toilets will be installed in various informal settlements such as Wag ’n Bietjie and Beverly Hills in Sir Lowry’s Pass this year,” said the mayoral committee member for health, Benedicta van Minnen.
“In addition, City Health in the past financial year and until now has held 10 health interventions at Rasta Camp, crèches in the surrounding area, and the primary school, focusing on diarrhoea prevention, personal hygiene, grey water, and illegal dumping. The community was also addressed on the dangers of using contaminated river water.”
For Somerset West-based social activist Stephen Leppan, who visits the area regularly, the efforts were too little too late.
“After so many years of democracy people are supposed to have hope,” he said.
“But how can you have hope when every morning you’re faced with a bucket of poo?
“It’s nearly 2015 and our people still have to s*** in a bucket. That’s not right. Something has to change now.”
Cape Argus