{"id":250036,"date":"2023-02-15T01:03:13","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T23:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-cape-town-waste-collector\/"},"modified":"2023-02-15T01:03:13","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T23:03:13","slug":"a-day-in-the-life-of-a-cape-town-waste-collector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-cape-town-waste-collector\/","title":{"rendered":"A day in the life of a Cape Town waste collector"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Avuyile Masekwane burns rubbish in Burundi, in Mfuleni in Cape Town. Photos: Masixole Feni<\/p>\n

This is Avuyile Masekwane\u2019s last month as a refuse collector in Mfuleni, Cape Town. Though the work is difficult and demanding, she will be sorry when her 12-month contract ends at the end of February.<\/p>\n

Twenty-seven-year-old Masekwane works for the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) collecting rubbish, five days a week, from 8:30am to 3:30pm. She earns R27 an hour.<\/p>\n

She gets up at 6am. At 7:30 she wakes up her four-year-old son, Sinokuhle, and washes him with water in a bucket she filled the night before from the communal tap. \u201cBy 8am I take him to school so he can still get the porridge served warm.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 8:15am she is at work, collecting and sorting rubbish and throwing it in one of the green containers provided by the City.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople scatter the rubbish all over the place, that\u2019s when we come in, and organise it in order,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Masekwane is used to seeing dirty nappies, human excrement, and condoms. And lots of beer bottles. She and her colleagues separate what can be recycled, mainly glass.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hot and tiring work, especially in the summer. \u201cWe are on our feet all day.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are communal taps to drink from and wash her hands, and at midday she takes a break. \u201cIf I have a lunch box I eat at work, other days I go home and prepare something to eat,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

At 4pm she fetches Sinokuhle from school. At home she rests for half an hour then it\u2019s the evening routine of fetching water, washing, cooking and settling Sinokhule in bed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes me happy about my job is that we all know each other because we\u2019re from the same community,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd the best part is we don\u2019t have to pay for traveling to get to the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the community is showing love and support for the work we do cleaning up our environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The job needs patience, she says, and understanding of other people.<\/p>\n

Masekwane will be sorry to stop work, but she says it\u2019s right that other people on the EPWP database should have their chance. \u201cThey also need to earn an income.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for her, she\u2019ll be out looking for another job.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The ditch in Burundi is full of rubbish.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Avuyile Masekwane burns rubbish in Burundi, in Mfuleni in Cape Town. Photos: Masixole Feni This is Avuyile Masekwane\u2019s last month as a refuse collector in Mfuleni, Cape Town. Though the work is difficult and demanding, she will be sorry when her 12-month contract ends at the end of February. Twenty-seven-year-old Masekwane works for the Expanded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":250037,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-250036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-cape-town-waste-collector.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}