White, middle-class South African family live in township shack for a month

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What are we doing

• Challenging ourselves as a well-off white middle family to survive on the average black household income of R3000 per month

Why are we doing this?

• For our family to have a direct experience into a daily South African existence so that we can create a boarder conversation of the role that empathy in places in underpinning a healthy democracy

How are we doing this?

• Living in a 9m2 one room shack with outside communal tap and ablutions with no electricity for cooking and lighting
When are we doing this?

•August 2013
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The highs and lows of our first few days

There was much excitement in the Hewitt household on Sunday morning when we bundled the children into our car and set off for Mamelodi to go drop off all our ‘stuff’ for the month (mattresses, clothes, paraffin lantern, buckets etc). Upon arrival we could immediately sense the jovial atmosphere that had infiltrated the township on this post pay day weekend. We were pleasantly surprised to see the effort Leah and our landlord had made with our shack: some rat sized holes between the floor and the walls had been cemented up and the shack had been given a quick lick of paint and the floors a polish. We unpacked, headed back to our other home, left the car behind and caught a taxi back to Mamelodi.

Here are some of the highs of the first 48 hours in our new home for the month:

  • The warm welcome the community gave us and the steady stream of people who came to say hi
  • Sitting around a communal fire at night with a melting pot of cultures represented: the Ndebele, Xitonga, Xhosa, Pedi, Sotho, Afrikaans and English.
  • Experiencing the beat and rhythm of weekend township life with loud kwaito beats competing with Sunday gospel music and coal fires announcing the imminent arrival of supper and another cold winters night
  • The entire Putco bus singing gospel songs together on the way to work at 6:30 this morning
  • Children blissfully unaware of class and colour barriers: making friends, learning to cartwheel, chasing each other around with joy and abandon
  • The good Samaritan lady who saw me standing on the side of the road yesterday waiting for a taxi after fetching the children from school and offered me a lift, initially just down the road but upon hearing our story to our shack doorstep (her first time in Mamelodi)
  • Having conversations with people we would never have conversed with before like Sipho from Mica
  • Appreciating just how good a spaghetti meal with a basic tomato, leek, celery and onion sauce tasted after a day of oats for breakfast and a single potato for lunch

And some of the lows:

  • Experiencing a bone aching cold on the first night. Being way under-dressed for the bitter cold in bed and worrying about the children freezing
  • Water condensing on the shack roof while you sleep and drip drip dripping cold drops on sleeping bodies
  • Rats. Hundreds of them. Luckily none in our shack but scurrying outside as soon as the sun sets
  • Alcohol. Too much of it. Post pay day celebration turned inebriation. Luckily not in any way aggressive
  • Adjusting to living in such small space with children.
  • Frayed nerves in over tired children. Not knowing how to discipline effectively when tiredness turns to rudeness and fighting and there is no space for timeout, no TV or books for quiet time
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Link.
 
Heard about it on radio, think its pretty admirable.

/Don't think I would ever...
 
How utterly daft exposing one's children to that out of choice. Surely one has a responsibility to one's offspring to cater to their basic needs, first and foremost, to the best of one's ability.

If you want to expose yourself to such matters as a consenting adult more power to you, but leave the kids with their favourite aunt you imbecile.
 
^ agreed - leave the kids somewhere else.

It is no picnic, they should rather do it for three or four months straight.
 
Interesting. Personally I think all white people of SA need to spend some time in townships in general. It really helps one understand how different people with different cultures think and feel and what their struggles and hopes are.
 
School is really important: reading, writing, arithmetic. But what they tend to do is teach you reading, writing, arithmetic… then teach you reading, writing, arithmetic again, Then again, then again, just making it harder and harder just to keep you busy.

And that’s where I think they messed up.

There should be a class on drugs. There should be a class on sex education. A real sex education class, not just pictures and illogical terms.

There should be a class on scams, there should be a class on religious cults, there should be a class on police brutality, there should be a class on apartheid, there should be a class on racism in America, there should be a class on why people are hungry.

But there’s not. Their class is on gym. Their class is like Algebra. We have yet to go to a store and say “can I have x, y, + 2 and give me my Y change back, thank you.”

Foreign languages are important, but I don’t think it should be required. Actually they should be teaching you English and then teach you how to understand Double Talk- politician’s double talk. Not teaching you how to understand French and Spanish and German. When am I going to Germany? I can’t afford to pay my rent in America. How am I going to Germany? I think the old should go through school again. I think that rich people should live like poor people, and poor people should live like rich people, and change every week. - Tupac Shakur aged 17
 
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HapticSimian said:
How utterly daft exposing one's children to that out of choice. Surely one has a responsibility to one's offspring to cater to their basic needs, first and foremost, to the best of one's ability.

If you want to expose yourself to such matters as a consenting adult more power to you, but leave the kids with their favourite aunt you imbecile.
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why shield the kids from the realities of life that many people in this country suffer from, it will be an exceptional learning experience that they'll never forget
 
Cius said:
Interesting. Personally I think all white people of SA need to spend some time in townships in general. It really helps one understand how different people with different cultures think and feel and what their struggles and hopes are.
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Boy I tell you what. You won't see me trying to survive a month in Kleinfontein.
 
Ol' Mean Bastid said:
why shield the kids from the realities of life that many people in this country suffer from, it will be an exceptional learning experience that they'll never forget
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Because you are intentionally exposing them to a higher risk environment than you are able to otherwise provide. It's wilful endangerment as far as I'm concerned.
 
Rocket-Boy said:
^this
They are trying to teach their kids something.
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They're trying to, sure, I just happen to think that they're going about it in a monumentally ****witted fashion. Much good the kid's life lesson will do him when he dies from rat-carried rabies or in a shack fire.
 
HapticSimian said:
They're trying to, sure, I just happen to think that they're going about it in a monumentally ****witted fashion. Much good the kid's life lesson will do him when he dies from rat-carried rabies or in a shack fire.
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They putting their children in the same conditions that millions of others with children have to live with every day.
 
Fudzy said:
They putting their children in the same conditions that millions of others with children have to live with every day.
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I'm not denying that. I'm arguing that they have the moral responsibility, and the accompanying means, to better see to their children's most basic needs (subsistence and protection) than what trying to teach some life lesson entails.
 
The_Librarian said:
^ agreed - leave the kids somewhere else.

It is no picnic, they should rather do it for three or four months straight.
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+1.

I've been through mamelodi on the bike and yeah, only reason was because we had safety in numbers.
There's no way I'd willingly go live there.
 
atomcrusher said:
Have you done this?
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Yep. I'm a typical white English South African and during my two year missionary service in Natal ('98-'00) I spent over a year working in townships (Umlazi, Madadeni). Was awesome. I seldom felt unsafe and learned more about my country and the people that live in it than any other time in my life. I also lived and worked in Chatsworth for 5 months. Granted the people of the area knew that we where Umfundisi (preachers) so the Tsotsi's left us alone as the community accepted us readily and looked out for us I guess. During December after most industries closed down alcohol was sometimes an issue with people getting very drunk most evenings so during that period we tended to not stay out after dark and headed home around 7PM instead of the usual 9PM just as a precaution but even that I felt was not completely necessary.
 
Hewitts: What we learnt from our shack stay

Pretoria - Taking a bath in a bucket has to be one of the most difficult aspects of “Ekasi” living for suburban mom Ena Hewitt.

Those baths - filled with a mixture of one kettle of hot water and another of cold water - were what Ena, her husband Julian and their two small girls Julia and Jessica endured through their month-long stay in the Phomolong informal settlement shack of their domestic helper Leah Nkambule.

Speaking from the comfort of their Wapadrand home in Pretoria East on Sunday, the couple related the experiences and lessons learnt during their stay in the Mamelodi settlement.

“We came back with so much that pinpointing one lesson would not be easy,” Ena said.

There were inconveniences, and some ways of the lifestyle of those living in the settlement were difficult to get used to. “I did not like the bucket-bath,” she said.

“Not being able to bath properly, to wash your hair and feel really clean was difficult.”

The toddlers, aged two and four, spent a lot of time outside playing with other children - and they always came back dirty, and in need of a good scrub.

Julian said among his harsher experiences were the Metrorail trains, which he caught to work in the morning.

He walked for more than 30 minutes to catch the 4.45 every morning, before linking up with the Gautrain to get to Sandton.

The train had only once been reasonably on time for him to catch his connecting train, he said.

But it was his last train experience that made him realise the depths of the inconvenience of public transport.

“There was a problem with the (rail) line, so I had to walk for more than an hour to get to the next station to catch the train,” Julian said.

He had learnt a lot from the train experience.

Julian said he experienced the congestion of the carriages, and people hanging on from outside, in their desperation to get to work on time.

“It was constantly like a wave of people coming in,” he said.

The couple had set themselves the challenge of spending 31 days in Nkambule’s shack after paying her a visit.

They had realised that although they lived no more than 15km from their domestic worker, they had no idea of the conditions she lived under.

“We did this for ourselves, we have been aware of the mental boundaries and wanted to get over them,” Julian explained.

The couple had also hoped to get a conversation going - one that would get people talking about the divides that existed between the social classes.

They had gone into the township with a budget limited to R100 a day, a laptop to blog on, and their cellphones.

“We only ate meat twice during our stay, and I only once bought a litre of milk, so our diet was without meat and dairy products, and we only drank water,” Ena said.

They slept on the floor, and during their first week there they all caught flu.

The Hewitt parents also lost 5kg each, within the first two weeks of their stay.

Their diet included pasta, split peas, soya mince and beans with bread.

“Lucky Star pilchards became a favourite with the girls,” said Ena.

She learnt to cook on the primus stove, one pot at a time, which meant starting to cook supper just after 2pm on some days, to make sure the meal was ready by 5pm.

“Cooking on a primus stove takes a really long time, but we also had a solar cooker that we would sometimes use.”

“Our understanding of poverty had been largely academic and not real, and not about crossing those divides,” said Ena.

There were many little things that they had taken out of their experience, and many more would pop up as they continued with their daily lives.

“After the bath experience I came back home and told our helpers that they could go into the bathroom and take a shower or lie in the bath for as long as they wanted to.

“This was because I realised that was one benefit they might live their whole lives without,” she added.

Pretoria News
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As they recap their stay, so much was similar to my childhood and early teenage years. And yeah, bathing in a bucket is depressing! Thankfully my son will never have to experiance that.
 
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