Shyaka Kanuma
Before Minah Moselani accidentally walked into the helping hands of the Rosebank Homeless Association, her life seemed to have reached a dead end.
Moselani’s circumstances were typical of many young women. She had dropped out of school, had no job and the poor relatives she lived with in the Brits area of Pretoria were no longer on speaking terms with her, partly because they were forced to support both her and her child.
“After life had become impossible at home, I came to Johannesburg in 1995 to look for a job any job and I survived doing part-time work,” Moselani says.
Resolute and determined, she took any job she could find a five-day stint housekeeping at the Rosebank Hotel, for example, and a longer session as a cleaner at the Grace hoping something more meaningful would come up.
Her first break came when she found accommodation at the Immaculata Convent a founding member of the Rosebank Homeless Association which is run by the Sisters of Mercy.
Last year the sisters found Moselani a job cooking for the shelter’s inmates, about 100 homeless people. And after attending the association’s dependable-strengths course, they found her a full-time job as a cleaner and cook at St Martin’s Church in Rosebank.
Says the administrator of the association, Ingrid Andersen: “What we want to do is help the homeless help themselves, and we can do this by helping build the capacity of those willing to work, by helping them acquire life skills through our dependable-strengths course.”
Founded in 1999 as a forum of concerned groups Partners for Urban Renewal, the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless, the Rosebank police, a number of churches, local councillors and the Immaculata Convent the association has come up with innovative ways to help the more than 300 homeless people who live in the Rosebank area.
There is a soup kitchen and the homeless get food parcels twice a week. Some have also received assistance to launch self-employment schemes. They make quilts, wash cars, plant vegetable gardens and engage in a number of other income-generating activities.
Andersen says a few of the homeless people have proved difficult to help, but “you have to be realistic. People who are struggling for survival on the streets can develop survival mechanisms such as petty theft, the telling of long, detailed stories in order to get money and so on. If you have compassion, you have to see beyond that to the person you are helping.”
A survey done by the association shows that 72,1% of the homeless in Rosebank are male. The population composition of the sample was representative of the South African population as a whole: 0,4% were Asian, 4,5% coloureds, 5,8% whites and 89,3% blacks. The majority (74,8%) said they had come to Johannesburg to look for jobs.
According to the survey, other main causes of homelessness related to the break-up of relationships and marriages, violence in families, mental problems and former convicts who can’t bear to go back home.
The association says government departments are interested in its initiative although Anderson says they haven’t promised anything concrete. However, “they have shown a lot of enthusiasm”.