It’s always dark in here

She looks down while washing dishes in a bucket as we enter the house where she lives with 56 people scattered around the house and on the property.

‘Please sit down. Sorry, the couch is a bit wet,” she says. It is striking how dignified she looks while sitting up straight in a pink dress with her hands folded on her lap. Gerrie Groesbeek (68) and her two sons, Rudi (38) and Emile (44), have been without electricity for months.

For this family living in Clairmont, Pretoria, load-shedding has no effect on their lives at all. They learned to live without electricity some time ago.

‘We are ahead of everyone else,” says Rudi ironically. ‘A lot of people have to adapt to these circumstances now.” Unlike other South Africans, they don’t get stuck in traffic jams, they don’t get upset after missing their favourite TV programmes and they don’t miss having a hot shower, because these are luxuries they have not known for a long time.

Rudi lost his job after the family’s power was cut. He used to fix computers at home. Now he walks around looking for jobs to repair computers at other people’s homes. ‘It is really hard without electricity, but we cope,” says Gerrie.

‘We bathe in cold water. In winter it is a bit tough to decide which part of your body to wash first. It is also very cold in the house. We used to make fire outside, but now we can’t afford to buy wood anymore.

‘If we cook with paraffin, soot clings to our bodies and then we struggle to clean ourselves with cold water. Washing our clothes is also difficult. We only do washing once in a while when we have money. Then Rudi walks to the laundry five blocks away,” Gerrie adds.

When asked how the constant rainfall affects their lives Gerrie looks pleased: ‘If the weather is like this, our food stays fresh for longer.” As for their two cats, Snowy and Higgins, ‘they eat what we eat”.

To ‘get their minds off of things”, Gerrie and Rudi often walk to Saddles restaurant nearby to watch a bit of TV.

Susie van Niekerk is a resident at the Adrion Housing Project, a sub-economic housing scheme in Zandfontein on the outskirts of Pretoria. She says: ‘My son comes to fetch me once a week to bath at his house.” For domestic chores, the residents heat water in a ‘donkey”, which is a drum built into concrete with sufficient space to make fire underneath.

Susie walks with a crutch towards her room. On the way she passes her neighbours, who are making a fire. She immediately points out her mini TV: ‘I can even watch TV. The TV is connected to a car battery. I got it for Christmas once.”

Rensca Herbst (29), her husband Sarel (30) and their three children have been living in a dilapidated house in Hillary, Durban, without electricity for three years. They often struggle to meet their basic needs, but after years it becomes easier to cope with.

‘We recently learnt how to make fire in the rain,” Rensca says proudly. ‘You take three full newspaper pages and fold it in a certain way. It can burn for up to 15 minutes and you can relight it quickly if the flame dies.”

It takes Rensca 45 minutes to walk to the nearest shop every day. She needs to go often, otherwise their food goes to waste. ‘Sometimes I leave meat with friends or family members. It takes me an hour to collect and an hour to walk back before I can cook dinner. After dinner we boil water on the fire to bathe.” Rensca holds her head up high: ‘It is not that hard anymore. We get to spend lots of quality time together at night. We chat a lot and sometimes we listen to the radio.”