Poverty is not comfortable or pretty
It long pre-dates Slovoville itself which is only 12 years old. Inside the building people are living. They are squatters as they don’t pay any sort of rent. Rooms and part of a large room house family units. One of the children from Khanya Centre that we work with was there.
What they want say the people there is an RDP house but although their particulars have been taken they think others were given housing before them. This would be hard to find out for sure I suspect.
The windows are holes in the wall in the ‘public’ places. The holes in the floor are many. There is one place where one walks across the floor beams tightrope style.
Outside is a concrete narrow hole in the ground. One can see water at the bottom. Apparently a child fell in there last year but was pulled out. Large pieces of broken concrete now criss cross it. The building probably belonged to a mine once and the Harmony Doornkop mine can be seen across a wetland of some sort.
I am told that two boys drowned in the wetland area while swimming. Children are very little supervised but also children will be children and they will try things out even if they are forbidden.
The wetland is the only really pretty place I have seen in Slovoville. It is filled with birds and sparkling in the sun. Someone wonders if it is toxic. Perhaps it is but it does seem very alive with birds so perhaps not.