ELISA PACHO has seven children, one of whom is adopted. Her husband David Pacho was a crew leader at Vaal Reefs. According to the NUM records, his older wife Irene Pacho has three children.
Elisa Pacho lives in Maxixi, about three hours’ drive north of Maputo. Not all the children attend school; a financial squeeze means she has had to decide who will go and who will not. The government is building a school near her home and she hopes all her children will be able to attend.
Pacho chose not to build a house with the compensation money she received, but lives instead in two reed shacks. That money is being used to sustain the family, but it’s running out fast. The family does not farm.
“I don’t know how I’m going to manage to bring up the children,” she told NUM officials. She may be helped by a skills training programme that will be started by the Vaal Reefs trust. Pacho wants to learn to sew.
Another destitute Vaal Reefs widow is Hortancia Solomone. When mineworkers and The Employment Bureau of Africa officials visited the compound where she lives, they were told by her family that she would not live for much longer.
Solomone is suffering from tuberculosis. The 67-year-old woman lives alone in a shack made from coconut leaves. The shack is dark and dank; she lights it with candles and a paraffin lamp, but cannot do much else for herself.
Although Solomone can speak, nobody understands what she is trying to say and it has fallen to her late husband’s two younger wives, Veronica and Constancia, to look after her. They leave her food outside the shack, fearing that they too will contract TB.