By Kevin Ritchie
Jessie Nkosi intended opening a spaza shop in Plastic City to earn some money. But the day the Tsakane mother of two who supports a family of seven left home one morning to set up shop in the sprawling informal settlement over the road from Brakpan’s Weltevreden landfill, people came running and screaming.
One of them held a toddler in her arms, unresponsive, but already going into convulsions. The child had drunk from a bottle of household disinfectant. Desperate, Nkosi tried to call for an ambulance, but not one would respond because Plastic City was a notorious no-go zone in Ekurhuleni.
Undeterred, Nkosi commandeered a bakkie and hurried the child to the Far East Rand Hospital. That was 2015. Today Blessing Mlambo is in Grade R at a preschool that bears her name: the Blessings Eco Preparatory School. What happened to her – and other little ones left to fend for themselves as their parents eke out a living picking through the rubbish that everyone else has discarded – struck a chord in Nkosi’s heart.
Shelving her plans to open a spaza shop, she decided then and there to start a crèche for the children of the recyclers in Plastic City to make sure no one would ever face the same fate. She called in her sister Hlengiwe “Twinky” Nkosi to help her.
Neither of them would draw a salary, instead they’d do it because of their compulsion to save the lives of children and serve God. Almost immediately they hit a wall of indifference from the local government.
The residents of Plastic City were the forgotten people. “They can’t pay fees, their parents all work in the landfill. Most of the children don’t have birth certificates.
“The recyclers come mostly from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with some of them from No Man’s Land, the 100km granite strip between the two countries between Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” says Nkosi.
Even though most of the children were all South African born, without papers they cannot access the grants that are their birthright. Another person with a compulsion was documentary journalist Yakima Waner. She grew up on the East Rand where her family has been in business for generations. She opted out of that career path by going to Wits to study a BA in dramatic arts, majoring in documentary and experiential film.
She followed this with a year in India, where a sojourn supposedly filming wildlife became a journey into telling other people’s stories. Now, in 2018, driving back and forth along the road between Brakpan and Benoni as she had done her entire life, she noticed the ever-increasing growth of Plastic City and began to wonder what it would be like to tell the story of the people who live there.
When her fixer, a Zimbabwean named Victor (surname) told her there was a crèche in the middle of the settlement, her compulsion became an obsession. She met the Nkosi sisters and what started as a documentary rapidly sucked her deeper into the fight to help the crèche survive.
“I was overwhelmed by the love and the care that Jessie and Hlengiwe had for the kids. They were looking for new ways to raise funds all the time. They had nothing but they made something,” she says.
Their plight reminded her of the stories of the Harvesters who operated in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania in 1942. The Nazis banned education and the children were starving to death so the community set up underground schools and secret food gardens tended by children to feed them, teach them responsibility and give them hope and a reason to survive.
An approach to Shoprite for a donation of seedlings during the Little Garden Campaign led to the head of the company’s corporate social investment department sending food parcels educational toys for the kids and then ultimately adopting the school.
First, the women had to find a new name because the original, Teletubbies Day Care, would fall foul of the copyright laws and so Blessings Eco Preparatory School was born. Their problems though were only starting. The school, now tending to 37 children in Plastic City wasn’t recognised.
Nor was the feeding scheme named in honour of Waner’s grandparents Edie and Collie, who had also experienced poverty and xenophobia, that they had begun to feed the children and other vulnerable members of the community – especially those unable to work because of age or chronic health concerns.
The municipality dithered over whether the school was on its land, the companies who owned the adjacent land, all of which made up the landfill, wouldn’t commit to resolving the problem either. In the meantime, Waner found herself the target of a vicious online trolling campaign by local, mostly white, residents worried that she was encouraging the people of Plastic City to put down roots.
“There’s a lot animosity towards the community, they’re blamed for everything; for crime, for pollution,” she explains, “others see it as grotesque but the people who live there are actually incredibly hard- working, law abiding and self-regulating. They are providing a wonderful service through recycling.”
Nothing the Nkosis and Waner did, seemed to help, not even approaches to local politicians. Eventually Shoprite issued an ultimatum, regularise the situation or its support would be transferred to another needy school.
Desperate, Waner turned to her family for advice. Her father Ernest and uncle Jeffrey (who died during the lockdown) were co-presidents of the Brakpan Hebrew Association. They had taken it upon themselves to maintain the old synagogue and its grounds, even though it was no longer in use.
“They knew all about anti-Semitism and about xenophobia,” Waner explains, “they knew what it was like to be judged, for certain lives to be regarded as less worthy than others, so they said we should consider setting up the school in the shul grounds.”
On May 30 last year, Blessings Eco Preparatory School was officially opened in its new premises. Shoprite brought in four other foundations to help; the Bright Kids Foundation which supplied the containers that were transformed into a classroom and an office, Asha Trust, Food and Truth for Africa and the Lunchbox Fund.
Together they planted fruit trees in the grounds, once again in homage to the original Harvesters, and dug beds for the vegetables on the other side of the classroom.
“The kids live in memory of other children denied life, we teach them every day that their lives matter, that they have agency and that they won’t be denied life,” explains Waner.
Before lockdown the enrolment of the children had grown to 45, 30 from Plastic City and the balance from the areas surrounding the synagogue, many of them poor whites.
“They know they matter too,” explains Waner. Last September, during the xenophobic outbreak that rocked Gauteng, crowds made their way through Brakpan, Waner’s mother took all the children and the teachers and sheltered them in the synagogue until the crowd passed by. This year Covid-19 and the lockdown threw everything into disarray. The school had to be closed down, but it left Waner and Nkosi with a dilemma.
“We knew we couldn’t lock ourselves away. Our kids needed us here, they depend on us for a meal a day.” They started a feeding scheme at the synagogue, partnering with Ekumbongeni Feeding Scheme down the road run by Albertina Sifunda, who they could see would be unable to cope on her own.
Together they helped the vulnerable in the area – who were not being catered for by official efforts; many of them migrants and poor whites once again. They’d planned to feed people three times a week, but were soon preparing 1000 meals a week, supported by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Angel Network, the St John Catholic Church and The Lunchbox Fund.