‘Mayor’ of Melville
MELVILLE - Keeping your backyard clean is neighbourly etiquette. But cleaning the entire street goes beyond neighbourly duties. "Not so," says Johan Coetzer.
Few Joburgers have not voiced a complaint about less-than-desirable municipal services.
“The municipality isn’t cleaning up. Why do we pay tax? Why aren’t our roads clean?”
These are common grievances often heard in shopping malls, intimate little bakeries, behind office water coolers and on litter-strewn street corners.
Two times a week, 72-year old Coetzer sweeps, rakes and lovingly maintains Second Avenue in Melville to rid it of of debris, leaves and rubbish in the road. And he’s been doing it since 1978.
He dares anyone to say that their street is cleaner than his.
“I’m anti-leaves,” Coetzer said simply on 2 June in his pristine street.
“Actually I’m anti-anything lying around, or anything out of place. Really, I’m simply a perfectionist. So I remove unsightly things.”
He shrugged apologetically and added, “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to clean up the street this morning.”
He might say he feels compelled to sweep, but it’s clear that Coetzer has a generous heart larger than his street, and larger even than this pulsing city.
“Doing this [cleaning up the street] makes me tremendously satisfied, it makes my heart so happy. Plus it keeps me young,” he grinned.
Street sweeping isn’t his only skill set. He’s known locally as the ‘Mayor of Melville.’ “I live to serve,” he said.
“I’d do anything for anybody.”
He even bakes pancakes every day – for the church, the old age home and for school fêtes. The morning’s batch of pancakes, he lamented, had to be baked by his wife Louise.
“Gout’s acting up a bit this morning, so my hands are a little sore,” he said apologetically.
He refers to himself jokingly as a ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of plenty.’ And he’s had plenty experiences in his life.
“I worked on the railways, and I saved and elderly woman from rape there, saved a young boy from dying and even acted as a midwife a couple of times – catching babies.”
He is also passionate about his volunteer-work at Children of Fire, a non-profit which assist young burn victims in Melville.
Coetzer would bend over backwards for his community. But there’s one thing he’s asking us to do in return.
“I challenge all the people out there to clean up their own streets.”
Well?
