Inside Boksburg’s burnt-down old school building

They are some of Joburg’s invisible and forgotten people. And if you really live life with blinkers on, you will pass judgment without a second thought.

Chantel and her friend Prince live on the first floor of a condemned, burnt-down old school building in Boksburg.

It paints a stark contrast to the leafy middle-class neighbourhood where the eyesore structure has been a bugbear for residents for decades.

And while it may impact property values in the area, it is the only part-roof that the pair have had for the better part of a decade.

The conditions they live in are shocking.

To get to their upper portion of the structure, they wade through a ground floor littered with landmines of human excrement, a muddy black sludge of decomposing, stinky stuff, piles of trash and a dozen or so bottom-floor residents.

This year was 40-something Chantel’s fifth anniversary at the address. The contracting company she worked for lost a client, and her employment went belly up.

She said: “Finding work in the current environment is exceptionally difficult, and I ended up losing everything. It was easier to survive on the streets and that is how I ended up here. Prince took me in.”

Her daughter also lives there, for now.

Prince has called the first-floor home for seven years. He has no family left, bar a brother he has not seen for years.

Home was Reiger Park, a few kilometres away, but the family he was staying with all died. He ended up with nowhere to go.

In comparison to the ground level, the upstairs area is an oasis.

Chantel, her daughter and Prince have tried to make the ruins survivable.

There is a tiny indoor garden and a separate living quarters area, the only part with a semblance of a roof, with walls made, it seems, from whatever they could find.

Any form of security is absent, but access to their haven is limited to two ledges that circumnavigate a giant hole in the floor. When they look down, they can see what the neighbours are up to.

Chantel said: “We do not beg. We make an honest living.”

She said she would not give up her last bit of dignity. So she and Prince collect recyclables.

“We make between R20 and R50 a day.”

There is no water, nor electricity. To wash clothes and practice personal hygiene, they carry buckets of water from a garage, where they are allowed to use the ablutions.

Downstairs, it seems a different story, with fresh people faeces attracting legions of flies and probably armies of dangerous germs and bacteria.

In the corner opposite their sky garden, a view through a punched-out window brings green treetops, a church steeple and sleepy suburbia into view.

Yet nobody in the neighbourhood has ever come around to check in, said Chantel.

She does not mind and prefers being left to her own devices, but it is an indictment on the neighbourhood residents that beyond complaints and petitions to get the structure demolished and its inhabitants evicted, charity seems absent.

They keep looking for work when they are not trading in recyclable trash, but, Chantel said, it is getting more difficult.

There’s prejudice, too. These days she works hard to not allow it to bother her but being gawked at by the better heeled still hurts.

“After working hard for a week or so, we saved up and decided to treat ourselves to McDonalds. But the first thing people think when they see you, is you will be approaching them for scraps of food or money, which we do not do.

“They look us up and down and take a wide berth around us. People seem to think we are rubbish, and have no feelings.”

For this family of circumstance, the festive season is pretty meaningless.

Prince said: “It is just another day, and we will spend it alone. I used to get sad and lonely when Christmas came along, but after a while you grow numb to it all.”

Chantel added: “We take it day by day. It is all we can do. If our neighbours succeed in having our home demolished, well, that is something we worry about every day. Because there is just nowhere else to go.”