“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

Photo by our new intern Alicia Schamburg

Cape Times, 4 June 2008

AFTER weighting down tent walls with sandbags and padding floors with wooden boards and plastic sheeting, officials and volunteers at Cape Town’s camps for displaced expatriates say they are well-prepared to deal with any more wet weather.

They had been forewarned about yesterday morning’s cold front, which brought high winds and torrential rains, and there were now no serious concerns about the conditions at Soetwater, Silverstream, Youngsfield or Harmony Park, according to staff at each of the sites.

“We are 10 times more ready than a week ago,” said John Thomas, a Baptist Church pastor at Soetwater near Kommetje, where 3 100 people are being accommodated.

“(People) are sleeping off the ground, and we are sandbagged all over the place.”

A water pump had been brought in for use if necessary, Thomas said.

The city began delivering stacks of wooden pallets to each camp yesterday. These are being used to raise the floors in the tents.

Also, a private company has been contracted to adjust ropes regularly to stabilise the tents.

Harmony Park’s spokesperson, Andy Hawkins, reported that a leaky tent had been fixed.

At Youngsfield military base, which is accommodating 700 people, spokesperson Wilfred Solomons-Johannes said the staff had been flood-proofing the camp.

At the more remote Silverstream, near Atlantis, where about 240 people are staying in six large tents, staff said the situation was “well under control”, although they were concerned about the icy cold nights.

Ten to 15 volunteers from the Pastor’s Fraternal Atlantis have visited Silverstream every day to help with sorting clothes and levelling the ground on which the tents are pitched.

Yesterday afternoon, the camp’s staff called in leaders from each tent, who also represented each nationality present, to take more blankets from the supply cabin to the tents.

Groups of young men were seen in pairs carrying large bags filled with woollen blankets across the fields.

Next door at the clinic, five nurses working 12-hour shifts daily reported that a baby had developed pneumonia and was taken to the hospital.

Staff at the other camps reported that a number of people had came down with coughs and colds, but said this was to be expected.

No one reported a shortage of medicines or bandages.

And to help alleviate overcrowding, non-profit group Shoebox Homes has lent 10 sets of its innovative bunk bed towers, each with five single beds stacked atop each other like drawers.

One set that arrived at Parow’s Lighthouse Ministries was immediately put to use in the women’s sleeping quarters, although the bunks were not stacked.

“We noticed that the beds could be stacked together, but we have enough space here for people not to have to sleep on top of each other,” said Annelise Minnie.

god clapped his hands and the rain came down.

and but for the fact that this happened at 5:35 p.m., precisely as I had reached the end of long street, the halfway point home, where the highways feed into city streets, where a lone road crossing begrudges a few short seconds to pedestrians every 5 minutes, and where the colored/black/foreign workers at the convention center/westin grand/ritzy waterfront shops, seasoned and fearless, make mad jay-dashes across speedracer traffic circles as they head for home in the opposite direction, it was quite nice.

it’s been muggy these couple of days.