Fire

Last night I witnessed what is, unfortunately, a pretty common occurrence in South African townships and informal settlements. When too many aluminum shacks are tapped into too few electrical lines, fire is often the result. At Red Hill, a power surge crackled through a line and ended in a small one-room dwelling, engulfing it in flames and gutting the inside in about 15 minutes. Fortunately no one was inside or injured, but the owners lost all their clothes and other possessions.

I was there because Mzo and I were about to hold our weekly men’s Bible study. We heard someone yell “Fire” and ran to the site. Mzo and several other men started filling and slinging buckets of water, and I found a fire extinguisher in our Living Hope container building, which sits just in front of the house that burned. I didn’t have a number for the fire department, but I did call the nearest police station – and no one answered. That’s comforting, eh? So I called another police station and they apparently relayed the message because a fire engine eventually arrived to douse the remaining flames.

It was a scary few moments, but nothing that the community had not seen before. Such is life in the shacks.