PEOPLE POISONED BY CoAL ... Sonto Mabina has a haunting smile. Even with her hat pulled all the way down, you can’t miss her slightly crooked grin and the creases around her mouth – but it’s actually her eyes that do all the work. She works at a small tuck shop that’s just a short walk from her home in an informal settlement over the train tracks outside Witbank, in Mpumalanga. She’s lived here for 25 years, arriving well before the three coal washeries that now surround her house. Through a crumbling wall in one of her rooms, she looks out over a toxic landscape. Black earth, roaring coal trucks, acidic water pits, and somehow, a community of footpaths that twist and turn through it all. Kids are playing outside. It’s just been raining and there are black puddles everywhere. A man rides past on a bike, a young girl, possibly his daughter, perched on the handlebars. Sonto turns away and comes to sit on her bed where a shaft of light washes down through a gaping hole in the roof. Sonto Mabina, or Katerina as she likes to be called, lives with her husband, Andries. Their house has no electricity or water and Katerina uses a coal stove to cook their suppers, the black plumes of smoke clouding their home. A municipal truck brings water once a week, but most say it’s too polluted to drink. If you can afford to, you buy bottled water in this area of the country; if not, you boil it like Sonto does and you hope for the best. “Dust is my main problem,” she says. “Every time my child goes to the hospital it’s because of the dust. The doctors say his chest is full of it. The doctors asked me where I lived and I told them. My other child also has problems with his nose because it is always running – the dust affects him too.” It’s an everyday problem here. Virtually every person we spoke to had a story of how coal plants and coal mines were making them sick. TB, coughing fits, red and leaking eyes, and childhood asthma – we heard it all. Take Mrs Machete, for example. She and her family live in Masakhane, a community in the shadow of the Duva coal-fired power station. - Mike Bailey.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 10:21:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015