The follow up work involved tracking down once more, families that we interviewed in 2006,
and visiting both informal settlements to assess the general situation.
Partially structured interviews were conducted with 33 families affected by OM.
8 families, representing 45 individuals were retraced to rural areas where they now
reside. These were families that we followed up in 2005 and again in 2006.
25 families representing 104 individuals were interviewed back in their informal
settlements in Bulawayo
This study therefore provides information on the present circumstances of 149
individuals, or around 10% of those displaced here in 2005.
A general assessment was made of numbers living in Killarney at this time, and a
record compiled from families in Killarney, Cement Siding area, of who has died over
the last 4 years.
Killarney and Ngozi Mine have re‐established themselves at this stage. Killarney in particular
is once more a large informal settlement, once more organised under various “headmen” as
would happen in a more rural context. What is very striking is the fact that among the families
we randomly interviewed in Killarney:
the average number of years lived in Killarney was 14 years.
35% had lived in Killarney for 20 years or longer. Three reported that they had
been born in Killarney and had never lived anywhere else for any length of time.
Only one couple, in their twenties, had moved to Killarney less than a year ago.
Only three family units had moved there for the first time in the last 5 years.
In Ngozi Mine, all respondents had lived there for 11 years or longer.
These findings corroborate what the Killarney pastor told us, which is that out of the entire
Killarney settlement of 200 families in the Cement Siding area, thirteen are families that have
moved there recently, with the rest being those who were affected by OM and returned.
20% of respondents indicated that they had never left Killarney, including during the
demolitions: they had simply hidden when the churches came to collect people, and had
rebuilt structures once the initial crisis had subsided.
Ironically, these individuals have probably had a better time of it than the rest of the Killarney
residents, who have between them experienced an average of 4,2 places of residence over the last
five years, most of these occurring in the first year as a direct result of the churches taking
people in! People reported moving from: Killarney to a church; then forcibly to the ARDA farm
after they were abducted; forcibly to a rural area somewhere; often to a new rural area or
rural business centre; then eventually back to Killarney, suffering huge stress and losses with
each of these moves!
3.
Eight out of several hundred families from informal settlements still rural
The seven families in rural Matabeleland and the one in Midlands constitute what appears to
be close to a comprehensive overview of those several hundred families, amounting to around
1,000 individuals, who were transported to the churches, then forcibly by the state to rural
areas, during 2005. All other families, according to previous records kept by the churches, did
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