By AKHANYILE NGQIYAZA and MIHLE SABA
A 65-year-old Gogo living in Transit Camp, raising her abandoned two-year-old grandson in a leaky one-roomed mud and iron shack, has appealed for help.
The toddler was abandoned by his mother when he was still a baby.
The woman doesn’t know where her daughter and two other young grandchildren are.
Since then, she has lived in a precarious shack built for her by her son on a plot owned by other family members. The tiny three-by-two metre structure is unsuitable for raising a small child, and they use an unserviced ‘bucket’ toilet.
In 2004, Transit Camp was opened as an informal settlement for residents to build temporary homes as they waited for RDP houses.
When applications for RDP houses were made, she was in Johannesburg for work purposes. She relied on her son Sandile, living in Transit Camp then, to make the housing application on the family’s behalf.
She returned to Makhanda. But when the houses were finally built and residents moved out, the grandmother was told she didn’t qualify for a house. She was told that she already had a house in Port Elizabeth.
But that house didn’t belong to her.
“I was living in Port Elizabeth for work purposes, and a friend offered a shack for me to live temporarily as she was not living there.” She said the shack was not registered under her name.
She doesn’t understand why she doesn’t have a house now.
She appealed to local citizens to help improve the shack’s size and quality for her and her grandson.
Anyone who would like to assist on this matter may contact her on this number: 0634443785.
