Street vendor Emihle Phoswa, who braais pork chops and chicken wings for customers from a braai stand outside her home, said the waste pile up near her trading spot was unbearable, and causing her to lose business.
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Mounds of garbage believe been piling up on the streets of a Dunoon informal settlement since the last service provider’s contract expired.
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Residents are deeply concerned about risk to health, an increasing rat population, and threats to children who play on the rubbish heaps.
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South African National Civic Organisation branch chair says the modern contractor is not allowed to clean in the area unless local workers are employed.
Heaps of uncollected garbage are spilling over onto the narrow roads of Doornbach informal settlement in Dunoon, with the waste not having been collected since 30 June when the previous refuse collection contractors contract expired.
It is not clear whether a modern contractor has been appointed by the City of Cape Town, but South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) Dunoon branch chair Elliot Nkohla said a novel contractor had started removing waste. He said SANCO stopped the contractor, demanding employees be verified as local residents registered on the Blaauwberg subcouncil’s unemployed database.
“They are not going to work until we secure the list (of the City contractor’s employees) to verify that they are Dunoon residents,” said Nkohla.
Dunoon ward councillor Messie Makuwa said “the community” was still negotiating with the novel contractor over how many people from Dunoon they employed to collect refuse.
Mayco member for Urban Waste Management, Grant Twigg, said the City was “currently engaging on various mechanisms to improve service delivery in informal settlements for the better of communities”.
Twigg said: “Although notices were issued to contractors to terminate their contracts by 30 June 2023, the cleaning of the area was still done until then. Should residents maintain experienced refuse collection delays prior to 30 June 2023, they are encouraged to please inform the City if this is still happening.”
GroundUp saw refuse strewn along Dunoon’s main thoroughfare, Potsdam Road, and children playing amidst, and on, piles of rubbish.
Community leader Phindile Mazula, who has lived in Doornbach for 25 years, said household waste was last collected at the conclude of June, with no refuse removal in the area since then.
Mazula said residents were dumping items such as nappies, food waste, beer bottles, and faeces, with children often sifting through the mounds of waste in search of toys or anything they could play with.
“It is unhygienic. It is affecting our health. The food waste is rotting. Children here carry out not gain a area to play, it is easy for them to contract diseases,” said Mazula.
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Y0Dler
Van is getting married, but he and his fiancee have never done the deed – in fact he\’s never been with any woman before. He\’s getting more and more nervous as the big day approaches, so he confides in his friend. His friend says \’No worries man. I\’ll come by the honeymoon suite before you guys get there, and I\’ll hide behind the curtain, and I\’ll whisper instructions to you.\’
\’You\’d do that for me?\’
\’Sure thing man!\’
So the wedding day arrives, it was a lovely service (so I was told, I wasn\’t there myself) and Van\’s friend sneaks into the honeymoon suite as promised and hides behind the curtain.
Van and his new wife arrive in the room, get settled on the bed, and things are getting steamy.
But Van is still super nervous and his tummy is bubbling, so he murmers to his wife, \’Listen babe, I\’m just gonna go to the bathroom quick. I think it\’s that wors roll from earlier.\’
\’Sure thing babe.\’
So Van goes into the bathroom, and he\’s taking quite a long time. And his wife is starting to feel the nerves herself. And it\’s getting worse. She can\’t hold it in. But she doesn\’t want to go after he\’s gone and totally ruin the mood. So she looks around and finally finds a shoebox. Quickly, she does her business in the shoebox, and she shoves it under the bed just as Van comes back from the loo.
Van gets back on the bed and they go at it again. But after a minute or so Van smells something not so lekker.
\’What\’s that smell?\’
\’Nothing babe,\’ he wife tries to assure him.
\’No man there\’s definitely something not so lekker in this room!\’VSo Van starts looking around the room, in the corners, in the cupboard, and finally he looks under the bed, and sees the shoebox.
He pull it out, and opens it up, and in horror he shouts \’Sies! Daar\’s kak in hierdie doos!\’
And from behind the curtain his friend yells, \’NEE MAN, DRAAI HAAR OM!\”
Metal Lady
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.