It started like this…

21

APRIL, 2022

New Year, 2020

Jarvis Street

Inspired by Afroz Shah’s example (he was the muscle and inspiration behind cleaning up Versova Beach in Mumbai), I looked at the bridge at Jarvis Street, and thought, “It’s not as big as Versova Beach”. After all, my dream was very simple: just get the river clean enough for kids to play in again – safely.

“It’s not as big as Versova”

So, I donned my oldest clothes, gumboots, gloves, got on my scooter and headed off to Jarvis Street to start cleaning up. Within days, two other women had joined me, Gloria Papu and Ntombomzi Monakali.

River Rescuers

We worked every day, rain or shine, filling black plastic bags. We each tried to fill ten before calling it a day. 

Most of what comes out of the river won’t go into a black bag

But there were problems:
    • How could we get the bags to the dump?
    • Old motor car tyres won’t fit into bags – neither will broken washing machines, old TVs, bits of barbed wire, blankets, or tree branches – and broken glass tore the bags.
    • A huge, abandoned recycling dump above the bend of the river was the source of a constant flow of rubbish into the stream.
    • Sometimes the smell of sewerage was overpowering and we gagged our way through the morning.
It wasn’t all ‘downs’ – there were ‘ups’, too:
    • Every taxi that drove across the bridge hooted encouragement, and passengers sometimes clapped and cheered;
    • People with bakkies and trailers offered to cart the bags to the dump;
    • One morning – totally unexpectedly – a front-end loader appeared and did in half an hour what we could not have accomplished in months;
    • Vuyolwethu Jezi joined us and worked tirelessly – quite often on his own – and at every opportunity;
    • More volunteers came to help, usually on a Saturday morning, and the cleaning up became delightfully social, filled with laughter and banter;
    • The man responsible for the recycling dump appeared and started clearing it up.

When the water eventually flowed freely under the bridge again, we heard it sing. When rivers flow, they have an astonishing capacity to heal themselves – if we stop using them as drains.

Evans Street Bridge

Upstream from Jarvis Street was the Evans Street bridge – blocked. Elizabeth Davies lives in Evans Street. Some people live for themselves; some live for the wider community – and Elizabeth is one of the latter. A small group of River Rescue volunteers came to help, together with about a dozen children from the neighbourhood. We set to with a will and freed the river to sing again … but … also to flow further downstream through an immense sewerage leak on its route to the Jarvis Street Bridge.

Enough hands (big or small) and matching determination can move just about anything!

Evans Street bridge … afterwards … for a while

Vukani Valley

Vukani

The houses in Vukani stretch up on either side of a valley at the bottom of which a stream struggles down to the Bloukrans/Mrwetyana River. The valley is verdant and, at first glance, looks like something out of an idyllic pastoral painting. Closer inspection reveals layers of rubbish under the kikuyu and alien vegetation. Silt has clogged both bridges, creating a wetland upstream of each of the bridges. The lower wetland is fouled with sewerage and it is too dangerous to work there.    

March 2020 – Covid and lockdown – but not the end…

When lockdown eased a little in July, I headed back to Vukani – and met the unexpected and the delightful. But that’s a story for another time.