IN PICS: A hidden haven in the heart of Boksburg

Count your blessings. There’s really a lot to be grateful for.

Boksburg resident Ronel appreciates what she has, and it’s not very much.

Along with her family and people she has taken in over the years, the 40-something widow shares her bush-squat property with about 30 people.

The settlement is at the end of a rubbish-strewn dirt road, well hidden behind bush and trees, adjacent to a small stream. A few hundred metres away is a major arterial road.

At Ronel’s house, some of the residents work for a living; others beg on street corners. But somehow everyone fends for themselves in this community of the forgotten in the centre of suburbia.

They’re hidden, invisible to rat-racers, but they are not nobodies.

Ronel said: “Generations of my family have lived here for 20 years. Right now, my children live with me, my grandchildren, too, and other people I have taken in over time.”

One of them, who Ronel also calls her daughter, was a young girl when she was abandoned and left in the care of the family. Ronel added: “She’s 20 now and has had three children, the first when she was 15. I told her not to get with guys, but she did.”

Completing school was not an option after that. Sadness washes over her face when she talks about her children.

“My daughter doesn’t work, she is disabled, and my son sits at home. He is, unfortunately, a meth addict and since the death of her father, my daughter has used it as an excuse to smoke dagga.

“There’s a lot of drugs around here.”

Ronel said she likes getting drunk, it’s her coping mechanism. She only has few days off to indulge, though, as her job in a back-room casino-cum-speakeasy demands 15-hour workdays, from 7am to midnight, seven days a week.

Her wage of R3 200 barely feeds anyone. Another family moved in last month and parked their caravan in her dusty yard. Ronel takes care of them, too.

She said: “We all chip in and help one another, we are a community. That is how it works here.”

She bought the remains of her house for R6 000 from her landlord a few years ago, but not the land, and pays about R2 000 of her salary toward its rental.

Two years ago, a fire ravaged the home and her family now sleeps in tents, between four walls. Ronel shared: “The house was petrol bombed and everything burnt down”, adding the perpetrators were never caught.

“The police came at the time but did nothing.”

There is still no roof. When it rains, wet residents huddle into drier rooms or tents. Only Ronel’s bedroom and what passes as a bathroom has a roof.

There’s no toilet inside, but an overfull bucket of used toilet paper covered with a holed-plank suffices as a lavatory. The Porta Loo outside is full, too, and council contractors neglect to empty it for long stretches of time.

She said: “We end up having to empty the bucket in the stream that runs past our settlement.”

She shares her bath with the other 29 residents. It’s not a suburban tub, it’s known as a was-kom in kasi speak, a plastic tub that is filled with hot water, which in turn is heated in a large metal barrel over a fire outside. This makeshift geyser is called a donkey.

Ronel said: “We may not have much, but we are clean people.”

Her neighbours half-moon the property in an informal settlement without any services except a row or two of blue Porta Loos, and they’re in the same state as the one shared in her yard.

“We have a good relationship with everyone,” she said, and introduced the husband of a neighbourhood pair who live a few paces down the road.

“There is no black or white here, just a community of people who share the same struggle.”

While she said that, ultimately, she would like to be able to improve their circumstances, for now, she does not want to be anywhere else.

She said: “It’s safe here. I feel more protected here than on the other side of the bush [the city].

“This is where my husband and I spent our married life together. It’s his home, too.

“But I do want much better for my grandchildren. That is why I work; it is why I exist.”

– news@citizen.co.za