Zorena Jantze & Marthina Mutanga
SITTING on her bed in a tin shack with her elderly mother, Oletu Nghikupulwa seemed composed while describing how a normal Saturday afternoon turned to horror as community members had their hands full to keep her husband from jumping into a pit latrine to save two children that were floating in the waste down below.
“My 10-year-old son and group of other community members followed footprints to where the pit latrine was. Someone suggested that people check the pit, but everyone shied away from the hole filled with human waste and water because it smelled terrible. My son however decided to kneel down and check inside the hole and he discovered the body of the little girl floating on top of the waste.”
Oletu lost her two-year-old adopted son Erastus Ndjituwamata when he drowned in the pit latrine along with a little girl of the same age, Lucia Fernando in the Ombili informal settlement over the past weekend.
“It was a typical Saturday, Erastus prayed when he woke up and a short while later, his little friend Lucia came by and decided to play with him. She was the neighbour’s child and the two were inseparable. Her parents would come to fetch her from our house but she would come right back,” Oletu explained.
She added that during the course of the morning she went to go do laundry at the communal tap. Erastus and the little girl had followed her.
Oletu said that after a short while her husband came to fetch little Erasi and Lucia and went to the shop to buy a cold drink and Nik Naks for the kids and left them playing with four other children from the neighbourhood.
“My husband came back home as I was dishing up lunch at around 13:00. I asked him where Erastus was and he stated that he was outside playing with kids. However, after a quick search, he was nowhere to be found. The neighbours told us that they could not find Lucia either. After this everyone in the community got involved, we searched for them all the way to Havana. However, the children were eventually discovered in the pit latrine just a few meters away from my house” Oletu explained.
The grieving mother explained that Erastus was just two months old when his father shot his mother before killing himself. He was orphaned until she decided to take him out of the foster care system because Erastus was her late sisters’ son.
Reflecting on the incident, Oletu stated that the death of her son emanated from poverty-related circumstances.
“When the COVID-19 pandemic started, the City of Windhoek warned that anyone relieving themselves in the river bed would be fined N$2 000 and as such everyone had to build their own pit to get rid of their waste. This is not the first time people died due to these terrible living conditions.
Two years ago, a woman and her baby were swept away by floodwater in Ombili. We asked the City of Windhoek for help but to no avail. No matter how dire our situation is, our pleas seem to land on deaf ears,” Oletu said.
