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

by Jean Yung and Michelle Jones, Cape Times, 3 July 2008

The city’s Disaster Management Centre says an estimated 5 800 displaced African expatriates remain in places of safety, down from an estimated 20 000 at the height of the xenophobic attacks.

Head of the centre Greg Pillay says the city has spent R70 million on relief efforts.

Some of the expatriates are staying in temporary camps – 620 at Youngsfield, 440 at Blue Waters, 430 at Harmony Park near Gordons Bay, and 130 at Silverstream on the West Coast, according to staff at the camps.

The rest are being accommodated in municipal halls and on private properties, such as churches and mosques.

At the Chrysalis Academy in Tokai, where 165 expatriates are being accommodated, the displaced people and volunteers were upset when the provincial government took over responsibility for the supply of food two days ago.

Volunteers had been cooking three meals a day, using a kitchen at the academy. Now the expatriates are receiving the same food as those in safety camps.

“The food has obviously changed and people were frustrated, but it’s wrong to tempt them with stuff they cannot afford when they leave here – it creates expectations,” Chrysalis chief executive Nomfundo Matroos said.

A Muslim relief organisation, Mustadafin Foundation, was feeding 3 600 people a day, down from 12 000 four weeks ago, spokesperson Alia Lambada said.

The organisation allocated R5 for breakfast and R12 for supper for each person each day and had spent more than R1m, Lambada said.

The SA National Zakáh Fund has spent about R1 million.

The Salvation Army has spent about R250 000 on blankets, food and petrol, while Historically Disadvantaged Individuals Support is feeding 1 700 people, down from 7 600 a few weeks ago.

Cape Times, 13 June 2008

HE HEARS their voices all the time – his 20-year-old wife and their eight-month-old baby, phoning from Pietermaritzburg. But before the Congolese family can be reunited, Adam Degol must first rebuild his life in Cape Town.

Separated while fleeing from xenophobic attacks three weeks ago, the family spent 11 days apart with no news of one another, until a Cape Times reader who knew the mother and baby’s whereabouts saw Degol’s picture in the paper and phoned him.

Degol is one of many displaced foreigners trying to reintegrate, go back to work and find a new home for his small family.

“I want to find a place in town, then I can feel secure, and I can bring them back,” said Degol, who’s been staying at Tokai’s Chrysalis Academy.

On Tuesday, Degol arranged a lift with a Chrysalis volunteer to see his previous employer, Ocean Securities, in Parow. The company still owed him more than R3 000 for the 26 12-hour shifts he worked in May.

Though Degol’s time sheets were in on time, the office manager said they couldn’t pay him until he came in person to confirm that he was using the same bank account.

Degol asked to be placed in a security guard post in town. He said he didn’t feel safe to work at Metro Khayelitsha.

But Ocean Securities only has work for him in Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain. The company has contracts in town, but those clients don’t allow foreign workers.

According to management, some of its 100 foreign employees have already returned to work in the townships.

Since guards get placed on the 15th of every month, Degol now awaits his new appointment. Ocean Securities offered to pay him a standby wage in the meantime if he came to the office from 8am to noon every day, but he has no regular transportation from Chrysalis.

He’s also worried about the high transportation costs of living in town far from work.

“I’ll take any job. I can paint, I can do anything,” he said.

Photo by Tracey Adams: Wenke Ndebele carries his bowl back to the kitchen at Tokai’s Chrysalis Academy.

Cape Times, 12 June 2008

TOKAI’S Chrysalis Academy, an unofficial shelter for displaced foreigners, has implemented an “exit strategy” to repatriate and integrate them as quickly as possible so that it can resume its normal work.

Chrysalis staff are working with community leaders and the provincial government to return the academy to its normal function as a campus for at-risk youth.

Currently housing 224 foreign nationals who fled from their homes in Vredenburg, Philippi and Capricorn, Chrysalis is not accepting any more people, according to Mark Jansen of the Department of Community Safety. He is assigned to Chrysalis.

“This was supposed to be an overnight arrangement, not a relief centre,” said Chrysalis chief executive Nomfundo Matroos. “We’re coping with what we have in front of us, but we’ve got to get on with our core business.”

The 250 learners currently at Chrysalis have been “very inconvenienced” by the influx of displaced foreigners, said Matroos. They had to cram into tight living quarters to make room.

“It’s sad, but we have provided what we can,” said Matroos.

According to the United Westlake Trust, a volunteer group on-site, the province-owned academy can comfortably house hundreds of displaced people because of its existing infrastructure of dormitories and community space.

But to do that, it needs to be designated an official shelter by the province, a decision that rests with Disaster Management, according to Jansen.

Caught in the politics, unaffiliated volunteers said the quality of life of foreigners as well as volunteers had suffered.

Donated clothes are not kept in controlled rooms and have been “ransacked,” according to volunteer Nicola Tyson.

Shelter staff moved the volunteers’ office to outside of the security gates last week – first into a tent, then a caravan.

NOTE: Andrea was in the field, reporting the “suicide bid” (such foreign phrasing to me), while I handled the back office calls to the UNHCR and various other groups. Thus she wrote about 80% of this story.

By Andrea Hart and Jean Yung, Cape Times, 9 June 2008

DESPERATE for United Nations intervention, at least one Somali – and possibly five others – at Soetwater attempted suicide by jumping into the Atlantic Ocean yesterday as 100 others threatened to do the same.

While police and Sea Rescue stopped a suicide bid, rumours spread that some refugees were still missing, causing a score of others to swim out looking for them.

Husein Faras, who attempted suicide, was rescued by other Somalis and carried back to the camp, refugees said. Community members surrounded the shivering 25-year-old Faras as he rubbed the bloodied cuts on his legs.

“He wanted to die because of his stress,” said community leader Abdulaani Wenliye.

“His brother was murdered in Du Noon in 2006 by robbers and now he has nothing to eat,” Wenliye translated.

Unrest was sparked in the refugee camp after an unsatisfactory meeting between refugee leaders and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Saturday. Immediately after the discussions, Somalis at Soetwater went on a hunger strike that escalated into threats of suicide.

They were “left with no options and no one else to appeal to” and “had no choice but to resort to desperate measures to get the world’s attention”, read a statement released by the Soetwater Refugee Leadership Committee.

The NSRI pulled from the water people looking for the missing four, said incident commander Ian Klopper. Three rescue boats and a team of swimmers were sent to the scene at 10am.

“We woke up and heard that four people had gone into the water to kill themselves,” said Somali Fatima Hiljk, who went searching in the water with 20 other community members. Hiljk said she was pulled out by the NSRI after several hours in the water.

“It is quite a dangerous situation because they (community members) were not trained for rescue and those waters are extremely cold and unsafe,” Klopper said. The typically unclear waters near Soetwater are full of rocky ledges and sharp barnacles, he added.

When the Cape Times arrived there, more than 50 people were standing on the rocks, still looking for people in the water.

“We are fighting with the UN because they don’t give us assistance,” Hiljk said, pointing to a pile of stale bread and bottles of expired juice delivered to the camp the previous day.

In addition to meeting Soetwater community members on Saturday, two representatives, Arvin Gupta and Yusuf Hassan, from the UNHCR’s Pretoria field office, met displaced expatriates from Caledon Square, Blue Water and His People Centre.

Though he could not discuss the specifics of the weekend’s talks, Hassan said South Africa did not have a resettlement programme and the UNHCR’s plan was to help the government with the reintegration of the displaced people – an unwelcome option for most camp leaders.

“We submitted our request to quit this country,” said Burundian Damas Nigonkuru from His People Centre in N1 City. “(UNHRC) told us they can’t do anything except to help the government reintegrate us. That was not something we were expecting. We were shocked.”

Yves Bonyeme, spokesperson for the Blue Waters camp, said they were writing to UN headquarters to ask for a visit from a resettlement expert.

According to Hassan, resettlement is an option, but an extremely rare one. A single resettlement application takes between 18 and 24 months to process.

“It’s not that UNHCR has a key to open the doors to all these countries, which is a deeply embedded view in the minds of these people,” Hassan said. Rather, its focus is on the safety and security of the large number of displaced people and to ensure that they are receiving assistance.

“We cannot look at the medium- and long-term solutions,” Hassan said.

In light of the Soetwater crisis, the Treatment Action Campaign has once again asked all levels of government to take action and close the camps.

Activists have demanded that President Thabo Mbeki deliver a mandate to the UN to repatriate or resettle displaced people in a third country.

“A tragedy is unfolding as people who fled xenophobic terror now face the uncaring machinery of the state,” read a TAC statement.

While the SAPS said the situation at Soetwater was back to “normal”, some Somalis were still threatening suicide.

“I’m ready to jump in the sea with my eight children because I have no hope,” said a Somali woman, Raxma Moalin. Clutching her five-month-old daughter, Moalin added: “I have nothing to give my children.”

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.

Cape Times, 3 June 2008

AN ERRANT beach ball bounced towards us, chased by a small Somali boy.

I stuck out my foot to stop it. The boy giggled and hugged my leg with all his might – a warm welcome to the Chrysalis Academy.

Here in the idyllic surrounds of the Table Mountain National Park in Tokai, past the towering pines, the campgrounds and the barbecues, has sprung one of the largest informal shelters for displaced foreigners.

It’s also one of the nicest. The 310 Somalis, Congolese, Zimbabweans and other displaced foreigners are staying in dormitories regularly used for at-risk youth who come to take part in free social crime-prevention programmes and leadership classes.

In the small parking lot where we pulled up, volunteers were serving lunch outside, piling rice and chicken high on to hot pink plastic plates.

A group of women sat on stools in a circle washing clothes in a plastic basin. Behind them, on beds of green plants, kids’ shirts and pants were laid out in the sun to dry.

A toddler peeked out of the driver’s side window of a royal blue bakkie. I asked him how old he was.

“He’s three,” came a voice from behind me – his mother, Horia Ahmed Hassan.

She wore a brightly coloured sweater over a full-length hijab, and her head was draped in a scarf.

She arrived from Vredenburg two weeks ago with her kids, she said. Her husband died in a fork lift accident eight months ago.

“They didn’t even given him a funeral. They didn’t do anything.” Tears fell from her face on to the ground like seeds.

The family came from Mogadishu 10 years ago. Her husband had worked for the contractor for seven years.

Since then, the stay-at-home mother of four has been staying with her brothers, who owned a grocery shop, and living on the financial support of her friends.

Then, the shop they’ve had for six years was attacked by xenophobic South Africans. They packed what they had left into the blue bakkie and went to the police, who directed them here.

Safe for the time being, she’s now worried about her 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter, both of whom should be in school.

“I’m worried for the education of the children,” she said. “What do we do? Life is |expensive.”

By now, a crowd of Somalis had gathered around us. All had similar stories.

One man held out a string of keys, “Left the bakkie, but still have these!” Everyone laughed.

Now that there was an audience, Ahmad Mohammed Ali, an ex-policeman from Somalia came over and began raving angrily about the South African police.

“They make the problems!” He yelled, swatting at the air with his baseball cap. “They are criminals.”

Under the guise of protecting their shops, the police would tell them where to park and then steal their vans and their money, he alleged.

The crowd murmured its agreement.

It’s nothing we haven’t already heard, so I asked them to show us their living |quarters.

We wound through a small path in the grass and crossed into a courtyard large enough for a soccer game.

In front of us was a two-story, grey-concrete building with outside hallways facing the courtyard.

We climbed up a flight of green wooden stairs to the sleeping quarters. Clothes hung everywhere.

The foreigners had separated themselves into rooms by nationality, one of my guides said. Each room was jammed with 14 single beds set so close that the metal frames touched each other.

There were nearly enough mattresses for everyone, though some sleep on the wooden floors.

Back downstairs, I got a tour of the open showers and the sole toilet in the camp. They take turns cleaning it.

Next, they took me to see the cafeteria. A large assembly hall had been cleared out, a small group sat at the far end watching a small TV, donated by a church volunteer.

Because I’m a reporter, they took special interest in showing me their news collection. On a large chalkboard, they had cut out articles and pictures of the xenophobic attacks and taped them into a collage.

Someone makes a daily run into town for newspapers, they said.

Behind a screen, I saw cardboard boxes stacked high with donated clothes. Every day at 4pm, the residents form a line and are given five minutes to choose their new clothes.

“We won’t forget that they are helping us,” said my guide, showing me the white plastic wristband that entitles him and anyone who has one to food and supplies. On it was handwritten with a black marker his name and number: Abderahman Hassen, 155.

We went back outside and into another courtyard. Twenty kids of all nationalities chased each other around.

A 25-year-old student from UCT, who heard about the camp from her roommate, held a crying girl in her arms.

“We are waiting for someone to tell us what to do,” said Hassen.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen. But nothing will be the same as before.”

Cape Times, May 26, 2008

by Jean Yung and Anél Powell

“BY THE time they came to chase us away, I had left my place without anything,” said Mousssa Seif Sudi, a 23-year-old Burundian who came to Cape Town in 2006.

He stood in front of the Cape Town Central police station where he’s been sleeping for two days. Behind him, a handful of children ran about on the pavement, clutching sandwiches and drinking watery soup out of styrofoam bowls.

On their left, Elizabeth Rajabu stood tall, but with her eyes ringed by deep blue bruises – the result of beatings as she escaped from her home in Samora Machel.

Sudi and Rabaju are two of more than 400 people, mostly men in their late 20s and 30s, camped out in front of the police station.

Many have been sleeping in the cold in Buitenkant Street since Friday.

They hail from Burundi, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, among others. Some of them want to return to their countries. Many others say that they cannot.

On Friday afternoon, a friend called Seif Sudi at work to tell him not to go home.

Then, more than 50 men with firearms, hammers and knives chased him out of Philippi.

“I’ve been running from many places, from Tanzania, from DRC, Rwanda,” said Nouwemana Amuri, a Burundian who has been in Cape Town for seven years.

He had on only a thin jersey. “Now I’ve got nothing. I cannot go home. I cannot stay here. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Another man folds and unfolds his weatherworn Home Affairs papers. “I need some peace,” he said. “Eight years with this paper.”

One man reported that a mob went from house to house in Nyanga, driving out the foreigners.

“I knew them. They were my neighbours,” he said. “But they are calling me ‘foreigner’.”

“A Xhosa man whose car I fixed told me, ‘Be careful on Friday. You people, you’ll go back to your country,’” said a Ugandan mechanic who has lived in South Africa for 10 years.

Another said: “People are hunting each other.”

Jean de Dieu Nolaysombaje from Burundi was staying in Khayelitsha until Friday. “They have burnt our shops. Even the police cannot handle these people,” he said.

A woman from Gugulethu said she was kicked out of the house she was renting after being told she was an amakwerekwere, a derogatory word for a foreigner.

Janvier Myamurasa said looters even stole his food before they razed his Gugulethu home.

He said he was afraid to stay in South Africa, but he could not go home to the DRC.

MC Abdul of Burundi said he had stashed all his savings, more than R20 000, in his shop in Gugulethu.

But on Friday, the shop was destroyed, leaving him penniless.

Someone said the attacks against other Africans were the product of an orchestrated operation called “Red Cleaning amakwerekwere” that targeted foreigners.

“It’s called ‘red’ because blood will be shed. There will be no solution from the police or the government, only from the UN.”

Similar stories were heard at various other safe sites and community facilities.

About 50 Somalis who fled to Rondebosch from Delft, Du Noon and other areas have threatened to go on a hunger strike after looters destroyed their shops.

More than 600 people crammed into the Site B Hall in Khayelitsha, with children and adults being forced to sleep on the floor.

Some families managed to bring their television sets and mattresses with them.

Others just had the clothes they were wearing.

A man with TB lay coughing on a dirty mattress while young children played nearby.

With so many people living in close proximity, health risks are a growing concern.

But, despite their dire predicaments, a group of men were clustered around a television set on the hall’s stage excitedly watching a soccer game while the women dried their children’s clothes in the afternoon sun.

At the Mahlangu Hall, hundreds of refugees relaxed outside the sports hall, reading magazines or playing ball games while Metro Police offices kept watch.

And, in what was a glimmer of hope and an indication that the violence is being perpetrated by a small section of the population, there were also South Africans who had come to support their foreign friends.