Situation one
Cowdray Park, Bulawayo urban
A community of 9 adults and 14 children
Originally from Killarney informal settlement
Update Interviews: March, May and July 2010
2005/6
After the demolition of informal structures at Ngozi Mine, where several hundred people lived
behind the municipal rubbish dump in 2005, eight families were housed in five tents in
Cowdray Park, an adjacent high‐density suburb. When we initially followed up in June 2006,
we found that six families still remained there, living in increasingly impossible conditions, in
tents that had literally rotted into shreds. There was no water or sanitation, and officially,
there was total amnesia that these families were still there. One person had died of AIDS and
one family had moved to Killarney squatter camp, meaning that 19 people remained here by
mid 2006.
The Catholic church intervened and persuaded a headman in Tobotobo village of Umguza
rural district, to offer these tented families some land to be resettled on. This duly happened,
and five families were resettled there.
Follow up 2010
By 2010, the camped settlement at Cowdray Park was entirely gone. The six families still
there in 2006 were traced as follows:
One family has gone back to Ngozi Mine to live near the Bulawayo rubbish dump. The
husband subsequently died leaving a wife and child.
Four family units, all related to each other, were moved to Tobotobo by the Catholic
Church in 2006. Of these, only one remains in Tobotobo, with the others all having
moved back to Killarney in Bulawayo. Even in this one family, the husband has moved
back to Killarney, leaving his wife and three children in Tobotobo. He returns
occasionally to visit his family, but makes his living doing piece‐work in town.
The sixth family moved straight to Killarney from Cowdray Park, when the others were
moved to Tobotobo.
These six families now account for 29 people, as three children have married and there have
been several births. However, there have also been two deaths of family heads. At least four
of the children of school going age are permanently out of school at this stage. One, who was
very bright and who was originally placed in a boarding school by the Catholic church, has
since fallen out of school because the church stopped paying the fees: she is now 16 with a
four month old baby. Other children aged 14, 15 and 16 years old are also out of school, with
several others in jeopardy of dropping out of school owing to no money to pay fees and levies.
Out of 29 people, 9 live in Tobotobo (two adults, 7 children), and the other 20 have returned
to Bulawayo or never left, living either in Killarney squatter camp or at Ngozi Mine.
The fifteen of this group now living in Killarney have yet again faced displacement in July
2010, and are in the process of yet again knocking down their homes and reassembling them
off MacDonald Bricks land.
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