Ntsundukazi Mvandaba and her family were the envy of the neighbours they left behind when they moved from the Mandela informal settlement to proper houses in Delpark, both in Delmas. They moved five years ago into an Reconstruction and Development Programme house: unplastered and small, but the first real home for this family from the Eastern Cape.
Poster-children of the new South Africa, they symbolised so much: the move from shacks into proper brick housing with piped water.
This was delivery in action; a people’s government making good on its promises. Mvandaba herself was pleased that the days of having to walk to the communal taps were over.
But the typhoid outbreak in the Mpumalanga town has been a great equaliser. Like the Mandela squatters, Mvandaba and her family now rely on a water truck that brings water twice daily to the community.
It also symbolises much more: that delivery is ephemeral and needs constantly to be burnished and maintained. So, while a developmental state may provide housing and water, if it does not take care of the detail of the maintenance of water treatment and of effective sewerage, then democratic meaning can quickly turn to menace.
And the household tap that was once a shining symbol of a better life has become an object of trepidation. At best, it is good only for irrigation and washing clothes. Even using it as bathwater is an act of bravado forced on a helpless community.
“The water causes a very irritating rash, but what can we do?” says Mvandaba, pointing to her month-old daughter’s rough hands and arms.
The atmosphere is normal after the anger of the first weeks of the outbreak early in September. Women carrying five-litre bottles of commercial mineral water on their heads walk home or stand in line for public transport.
“I didn’t know that they sold bottled water. I saw white people on TV drinking from these bottles, but I thought that they were just playing cool,” comments Mvandaba, who is puzzled by the high cost of bottled water. She has taken to storing 10 25-litre drums in the minibus in her yard, eight of which contain water at any given time.
Another common sight in Mandela is that of children rolling drums because they are too heavy for their small frames. It is a mark of a community moving backwards, not forwards into the 21st century.
The typhoid epidemic has brought unplanned costs to this financially squeezed community. The added expenses are straining the Mvandaba family, which largely depends on child support grants. Each grant is R180.
Mvandaba’s six-year-old son, Mbongeni, has not been to school since early September because, since the outbreak started, he frequently complained about various ailments. As the family dares not brush off his complaints, he has spent time at three doctors’ consulting rooms, each setting them back by between R90 and R150.
Mvandaba’s daughter, Sonto, has not been to crèche this month — the R80 fee has been diverted into buying bottled water and paraffin for boiling.
Although the government provides water in abundance, doubts persist about its purity. Mvandaba says they boil everything other than bottled water before drinking it or using it to cook. They buy at least four litres of paraffin a day at a cost of R5,50 a litre. But she insists it is cheaper than using an electric kettle.
Delmas mayor Thamsanqa Mmathosa was recently shown on TV drinking from a tap in one of the local houses to prove the water is potable. Mvandaba is not convinced. “I’m sure he was just drinking for the cameras — after that, he’ll be buying water like the rest of the people here.”
A deeper reason for distrusting water from the tap comes from her oldest son, Doctor, mysteriously falling sick “around this time last year”. “The doctors asked whether he or anyone in the family had been anywhere where people still drink water straight from the river. We told them we hadn’t.
“He was so sick that they told us that if he’d been any older they would’ve suspected HIV. Now how can we trust the water from the tap?”
But for Mandela resident Celia Mpinga and the rest of her community — who are too scared to fetch water from the communal tap after sunset, because of the crime risk — the Mvandaba household is still better off. Mpinga is still stuck in the old South Africa: she lives in a squatter camp on the outskirts of Delpark without electricity or piped water or any of the accessories of delivery.
“It’s true we envied them when they left this area. We still do. They still have water in their own yards and inside the house. They live in proper houses.
“But for now we are in the same boat because we both depend on the water trucks. But we still have to walk to the street corner to get our water because the roads are bad.
“This typhoid thing will pass — but we will still be living here.”
Outbreak over
The typhoid outbreak that has engulfed Delmas, Mpumalanga, in recent weeks has reportedly been brought under control. According to the provincial authorities, on Thursday the official death toll remains at five and only 34 new infections had been reported by October 3 at the Bernice Samuels
hospital, Botleng clinic and Dumat clinic in Delmas.
This brings the number of confirmed typhoid cases to more than 600, while more than 3 000 people in the area have been treated for symptoms of the
disease since the outbreak in mid-August. — Monako Dibetle