WINNER: Living in a Hurricane

It is said that the area we lived in had experienced a tornado storm that swept through many of the cape flats, roofs were torn apart, bricks and windows were all broken. All this happened a year before my birth. I guess you can say I came in with a storm. After this tornado the area I lived in was given a nickname by the community and surrounding communities. A place known as Manenberg was now given the nickname Hurricane village.

The people who lived in Hurricane village were not very bothered by their circumstances. They always found joy in the smallest things like uncle Faroekie who sells his vegetables on a sunny day walking through the cape flats with his trolley full of potatoes, onions fruits and other vegetables with washing hanging 3 stories high in the block, singing his marketing song “aarteple en aver more kom die druiver.” The children would run alongside him and sing with him while the older people laughed at the silliness of the children.

They walked until the end of the block with uncle Faroekie singing the same tune. On the other end of the flats comes a group of young men entering the block, probably still meant to be in school but dropped out.They come rushing through the block with hands in their pants and behind their backs mumbling gang language among one another as they pass through. Not long after they passed we heard loud bangs of Gun fire going off “DWAH DWAH DWAH” children scatter and ran to the closest open door in the block seeking shelter. The old people were always pulling kids into their homes when gunshots were fired. They didn't even care whose child it was or if they even knew who the child was. Many times I would just see random kids with worry in their eyes standing in our house grabbed from outside by my grandma when it was gang wars. This was normal for us living in hurricane village.

The group of men came running back through the block still shooting and my grandma pulled myself and my cousin dragging us to the kitchen by the sleeves of our clothes shouting “le plaat le plaat jong '' and if we didn't she would slap us on our heads. As we lay there we watched a man with a gun standing under our lounge window firing the firearm and someone was firing back at him.Terrified as we were, we still wanted to peek and see what was happening even my grandma. We heard the speed of the bullets just passing by our front window and my granny immediately shoved us between the fridge doors to shield us from any bullets that might come through the window. We laughed because my grandma laughed at us for being “beisag” as she would say . When suddenly it went quiet and we heard police sirens in the far distance, the man with the gun didn't know what to do with the firearm and he just went on and threw it into the black rubbish bin in front of our door and ran off. Our only thought was If the police search the block and they find a gun in a bin in front of our door my grandma would have a lot of explaining to do for something that has no business with her, imagine an old lady hiding guns in a rubbish bin.