Living in Johannesburg is like riding a big dipper. Sometimes there are only dips and more dips – electricity out, taps dry, and sewage the only running rivers – but then there are the days in between when I suddenly find myself on a high.
Walking with Romy Stander, Director of Water for the Future, left me on a sky-high high. Our tour started outside Nando’s Central Kitchen in Yeovil, where I learnt that its founders, Fernando Duarte and Robbert Brozin, also support philanthropic projects such as Goodbye Malaria and environmental initiatives like Water for the Future. This lesson was enlightening and humbling because I’d always lumped Nando’s with all the other ‘evil’ fast food outlets. I might just eat there now, but not the famous peri-peri chicken because I’m a vegetarian and hate anything spicey.
Next, Romy led us to a small semi-circular pavement garden with a 5-year-old tree at its centre. Here, she explained that this sustainable drainage system, or SuDS, replicates nature’s tried and tested solution that our city planners seem to have forgotten. Not an ounce of concrete, minimal destruction, just healthy soil and thriving plant growth to absorb and deflect flood water.
After a short walk, we reached the point where the Jukskei River emerges or ‘daylights’ in the multicultural but impoverished neighbourhood of Lorentzville – a definite big dipper low. The narrow slick of filthy water is jammed with plastic and human waste, all consequences of a failing infrastructure, like the decaying sewage pipe’s contents that leak directly into it. BUT – and there is always a BUT where Romy and her team are concerned; the community is now thoroughly engaged and working with her to revive this precious resource and the surrounding area.
Our walk along the banks of the river was the antidote or ‘high’ we needed. Here, community teams are clearing the alien invasive vegetation to establish flora that will absorb carbon, clean the air and encourage/support much-needed biodiversity. And then, woven like a golden thread through the weft of endeavour, there is the beauty of creativity. Extant Rewilding, a living sculpture made by Johannesburg artist lo Makandal, a mosaic mural decorating a bridge, decorative fencing fabricated from waste wood, the list goes on, and like the new vegetation, it is growing by the day.
The tour ended in Victoria Yards, a co-funder of Water for the Future and host for other amazing initiatives like the medicinal nursery grown in vertical wall containers, the indigenous fruit tree orchard and the use of removed invasive alien plants to produce biomass for furniture-making, composting, paper and firewood. BUT this is only a small percentage of the activities spearheaded by Water for the Future and its community teams. If you want/need a big dipper high, look at their website and then take a tour.
