Death confronts the staff and patients at Ikhaya Lobomi, a hospice in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, almost every day. But in this spectacular part of South Africa even death brings no relief from the grinding poverty.
Though the state maintains that all South Africans have the right to receive a decent burial, the local authorities here assume no responsibility for the dead. One patient who died recently was left to rot in his bed for four days at the volunteer-run Aids hospice while officials equivocated about who was responsible for removing him.
Once a shebeen, the Ikhaya Lobomi hospice is a hall lined with 17 beds. Its only other facilities are a makeshift kitchen and a storeroom. The hospice has nowhere to house deceased patients and leaves bodies in their beds, covered by a sheet, to await collection by the families.
But when Nkosinathi Sapho, who came from the Transkei, succumbed to lung cancer on January 6 there was no relative or friend to claim his body.
Patience Mavata, a nurse, and a team of volunteers run the hospice on donations and receive no government funding. So Ikhaya Lobomi was unable to carry the costs of Sapho’s burial. Even burying him at the nearby Molweni pauper burial plot would have involved transport and labour costs.
They tried unsuccessfully to raise financial assistance from Sapho’s former employer. Then they tried to track down the government mortuary in the area.
Dave Dancer, a Botha’s Hill businessman acting for the hospice, contacted the CR Swart police station in central Durban and was referred to the Chatsworth police station, where an official told him to contact the Chatsworth mortuary.
There he was assured that the body would be collected the next day.
Three days after Sapho died his rapidly decomposing body remained in its bed. In a follow-up call to the Chatsworth mortuary the officials told Dancer and Mavata that they were not authorised to move the body because the hospice was outside their jurisdiction.
They advised them to phone the closest police station, Hillcrest. There they received the same response. Though only a few kilometres from the police station, the hospice is on the wrong side of the road.
The road through Valley Trust is the border between Hillcrest and Inchanga — and Ikhaya falls under the jurisdiction of the Inchanga police station, about 50km away.
Inchanga sent an officer, who merely presented Mavata with the forms to state that Sapho had died of natural causes. The body remained where it was.
After four days in the heat, under a corrugated iron roof with limited ventilation, the staff and patients were overwhelmed by the stench of decomposing flesh.
A desperate call to the Pietermaritzburg South mortuary elicted the same all too familiar response about jurisdictions. But Dancer was referred to the provincial Department of Health and Environmental Affairs, which arranged for the Chatsworth mortuary to collect Sapho’s body.
At 9pm on January 9, four days after his death, Sapho’s body was finally collected. His body was in an advanced state of decomposition, one observer commented that it was fortunate that it did not fall apart when lifted from the bed.
”The worst part of this whole matter is not only that we got the runaround for four days, but that these patients, most of whom have Aids and no immune systems to speak of, were put at risk. What will happen next time?” asked Dancer.