Social experiment brings man face to face with the hunger that is commonplace in Khayelitsha, writes Warda Meyer.
|||Cape Town - Ayanda
Zenzile may look like any other Khayelitsha shack dweller taking advantage of the first sunny day in a while to do his washing, but the young man is conducting a challenging social experiment, living on just “R8 a day” ($1 a day) for the past four months.
Laundry is definitely not a priority for Zenzile, who’s more interested in food security, his brother’s schooling, their bills, and their tiny monthly budget.
In a bid to better understand the extreme poverty that grips much of his Site B community, Zenzile lost 12kg over the past four months, living on just R8 a day.
He resigned from his job late last year, he explains, with one goal in mind – to live in poverty, staying alive on this amount for the next eight months.
He told nobody about his plans, but says it has its roots in the fact that his neighbours, friends, girlfriend and even his own brother, who lives with him, are convinced that unemployment is the cause of all their problems.
He wakes up hungry every morning, goes to bed hungry, and spends most of his day
worrying about his budget, his younger brother and their next meal.
But he says he’s no different to most other people in his community, who are grappling with high levels of unemployment, combined with the constant threat of violent crime.
For now, Zenzile is living off his savings – so rations himself to only R240 a month for food, then spends a further R200 on bills, including electricity.
He’s passionate about his community, getting involved in causes to assist the people of the area.
He admits that many probably think it’s slightly mad for a healthy young man who had a good job in the restaurant industry to give it all up just to experience what the majority of people in his community go through every day.
But Zenzile says this was the only way he could fully understand, relate to, and hopefully in the end, help change the plight of the poor.
“You cannot see poverty, you can only feel it. So to know poverty you have to live it,” he says.
In the catering industry, he knows from experience, a lot of food goes to waste; the franchise he managed previously, he says, talked a lot about social responsibility, “but their main priority always remained making profits”.
Zenzile can now speak from experience when he says that it’s only by living in poverty that one knows what it feels like.
“It’s only men in grey suits, driving their fancy cars – that are making decisions affecting the poor, but deep down they have no clue what poverty means, while the people living in poverty rarely have a say about their own plight,” he says.
Zenzile chose the R8 a day budget in light of the reality that, a
round the world, one in every six people lives on just $1 a day.
The brothers, who grew up with their grandmother in Queenstown but who have been living alone together in Cape Town since 1999, live in a humble two-roomed shack, with only the bare necessities.
Zenzile owns a motorbike (which is parked permanently because they can’t afford petrol), a TV, an Xbox, a fridge and double bed, all of which they acquired while Zenzile still had a job. But their cupboards are bare.
In their makeshift kitchen section, their fridge stands unplugged containing only a 1-litre bottle of “Fusion” mix-a-drink.
On their tiny kitchen table are:
* A R4.99 loaf of brown bread.
* A small tin of coffee.
* A small packet of sugar.
And while they used to have margarine for their bread, the container is now filled with sugar.
And that’s what their diet consists of – and before the start of the cold weather, it even excluded coffee.
Zenzile eats once a day – half the loaf of bread, while his brother eats the other half.
“Most nights I do not even eat the entire half a loaf, because I want to make sure that my brother does not go hungry. And he’s very brave, never complains, even when I go and ask the neighbours for a meal for him.”
The pair buy R10 worth of electricity, which lasts an average of three days, and allows his brother to use a heater on cold mornings while he baths and dresses for school.
Zenzile is, however, concerned that the real cold of winter has yet to set in, and wonders what they’ll do when it does.
When asked why they do not buy maize, samp and beans instead of the bread, Zenzile says: “Then I would have even more expenses. I’d have to buy extra electricity and a dishwasher or soap to clean up.”
Zenzile concedes that his diet is taking its toll; on Monday last week he collapsed, sparking fears among his neighbours and police that he may be suicidal.
“My neighbour saw me lying on the floor and they assumed I was dead. The front door was locked and I somehow passed out when I tried to answer a knock on the door. He must have heard me collapse and he called for help.”
He says it may have been his request for food for his brother the previous evening that alerted neighbours to their plight.
The neighbours ended up calling the police, who broke a window to gain access.
“I just blacked out completely and cannot remember what happened,” he says, explaining that he took no pills, and is sure it’s a simple consequence of malnutrition.
“The doctor prescribed folic acid and other vitamins for me.”
To compound his worries, Zenzile is concerned for his 16-year old brother, who is in Grade 11.
“I know he did not sign up for this, and sometimes I worry about his concentration at school. In fact, he did not even realise what has been going on. Everyone just merely assumes that it’s because I am no longer working that we are having financial difficulties.”
He explains that he first came face to face with hunger while campaigning in his neighbourhood, discovering that many families were going to bed hungry at night.
“It’s not easy going into people’s homes, seeing how they live.
“For me and my brother half a loaf of bread is at least something. But for those who have five to six members in their family, a loaf makes little difference.”
He admits to cheating a few times, especially when visiting his girlfriend’s home. But he says he then eats nothing the next day to make up for the lapse.
warda.meyer@inl.co.za
Weekend Argus