Every visit feels as though it is my first time. The environment of Blikkiesdorp (Blikkies) strikes me. I am silenced on entering the gates. The compacted, rocky, barren sand sends my thoughts into a myriad of interwoven, internal narratives as I try to make sense of what is going on there. There are so many people living there and for all my critical analysis, I cannot seem to make head or tail about how government policy has completed failed to provide the basic requirements of health and education given that they have forcibly placed people to make a life there temporarily. How did this barren field of depletion become home to thousands of people?
Blikkies is a site where people are waiting for the promised government subsidised housing (a promise far too grand for any government to deliver on). It is also home to refugees, foreigners, asylum seekers and people who have been evicted off public land. All the people of Blikkies have been 'forcibly' removed. I have yet to meet a resident who is content with living in Blikkies. People seem to be resolute in their displacement. One woman likened Blikkies to a concentration camp, asking me, “How can we be expected to live like this?” So, many people recognise the abnormality of living conditions but are seemingly immobilised by what I imagine is the sheer magnanimity of their external environment.
Conditions are appalling. Each shelter is approximately 6 meters long and 3 meters wide. These shelters offer no insulation and are made out of corrugated iron sheets. They house up to 6 people and 4 of these shelters share one public toilet that is often blocked/dysfunctional/unhygienic. There are no public bathing facilities and so I assume people collect water and wash in buckets at home.
On one of my first visits there, I learnt that a WONDERFUL crèche that was started by residents of the community shared a toilet with 'a noncompliant' tuberculosis (TB) patient, making contraction and spread of TB extremely easy. Moreover, there is no health facility on site, (the nearest clinic is several kilometres away), no state facility for the education of children, no entrepreneurial initiatives to encourage skills development and reduce unemployment, no counselling programmes (there are too many children, adolescents and adults who have experienced violence and continue to live with violence who are in desperate need of counselling), no rehabilitation centres....nothing. Blikkies is just a collection of tin shelters inadequately housing the lives of people who continue to be traumatised by movement, displacement, and violence.
So, I'm left wondering, in a situation where housing has been promised and people have been placed in ‘Reserve-like’, spaces, surely government policy would include the uncontested notion that the basic requirements of health and education be met. This is not the case in Blikkiesdorp. Thousands of people are caught in an endless cycle, where people learn violent ways of communication and expression and both children and adults sink further into crime, drugs, and violence.
