In Braamfontein, Johannesburg, under the M1 North highway, a group of street children huddles together for warmth. Metres away, seemingly oblivious to the morning traffic, a middle-aged homeless man lays down on the ground, adjusting the heap of white dustbin bags blanketed around him.
Wrapping them more firmly around his clothes, it is his only real insulation from the cold.
Countrywide, temperatures have dropped to record lows for the month of May, the South African Weather Service reported this week. With average daily temperatures not even reaching the low teens in some cases, the poor and homeless are the worst affected.
”You can find people sitting outside the gate [to our offices],” says Timothy Mabaso, community relations officer for the Salvation Army, explaining that even though it does not offer services from the national office in Braamfontein, people still come by looking for help.
”We have to send them to the main distribution centre downtown in Simmonds Street.”
”There is no doubt about it; more people are coming in need of blankets, food and clothing [in winter]. Everyone from children to adults, men and women,” Mabaso says.
Shelters and charity organisations like the Salvation Army depend on donations to get by, and the need for these donations increases during winter.
”We have extra people coming this year [to get help],” he says, adding that since the cold spell started two days ago, a centre in the Eastern Cape has already given out about 2 000 blankets.
”Those were blankets they had left over from last year; they could have given more but that was all they had.”
The centre in Simmonds Street has handed out about 1 500 blankets, and expects to give out about 5 000 in total. For meals, it caters to about 400 people in the morning and another 600 in the afternoon, primarily serving soup and bread, but also curries and rice, depending on the donations it receives.
Simmonds Street also has sheltered space for 50 adult residents. ”But usually it’s full,” Mabaso says.
”People come and go all the time. But when it comes to winter, accommodation is not our priority. It can’t be because we don’t have space. Our priority is to give services, to try and keep people warm. We have to refer them to other places [for shelter].”
Heidi Bezuidenhout, who works with Resthaven Ministries, a welfare organisation in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg, also refers people to other shelters in the colder months.
Resthaven provides shelter and food for babies and seniors, with place for about 20 adult males.
”But we have been getting lots of phone calls for ladies and children, and unfortunately we have to refer them to other places,” she says.
Resthaven has a smaller shelter, and Bezuidenhout expects it to fill up for the winter months. Its weekly soup kitchen, which also sees ”a lot more people in winter”, is expected to serve over 100, and sometimes even up to 200, people.
For the Salvation Army in Gauteng alone, Mabaso says: ”In the last two days we have been seeing about 5 000 more people in our centres, and it could be even more than that. Under normal circumstances we see about 10 000 people a day; this [5 000] is on top of that.”
He admits that the centres sometimes run out of food. ”Feeding people increases every year … We don’t turn people away [but] sometimes we don’t have the capacity for more.
”We wish that there is nobody in the street to face these cold conditions. Sometimes we go out to feed people and we don’t know if they are going to wake up the next morning. But you are limited in what you can do.”
Malcolm Midgley, spokesperson for Johannesburg Emergency Services, says there have already been a number of deaths as a result of this week’s cold, like the two Soweto children who died in a shack fire and the man who inhaled toxic fumes when he lit a fire and sealed himself off from the cold and all other air circulation.
The South African Press Association also reported on Tuesday that four people died of exposure in Port Elizabeth, an elderly Pretoria woman burned to death when an old-age home caught fire and 20 other people were treated for smoke inhalation
Midgley says he expects to see more incidents such as these in the near future, as the weather makes people ”try every way they can to keep warm”.
But Lucky Ntsangwane, a meteorologist with the South African Weather Service, says the worst of the ”cold snaps” are over and the weather will start to warm up.
”We will see these cold snaps from time to time, every now and then … but the temperatures we have forecast are warmer than what you would expect for winter,” he says.