Last night I watched a family lose everything, I just happened to go out the front door and when I looked to my left I saw a large fire. Gcinisizwe said alarmend, "that shack is on fire!" He ran to the scene to help while I ran inside and grabbed as many buckets as I could carry. The shack belonged to our neighbour who lives about 300 meters away. Gcinisizwe, I and a lot of other neighbours spent 30minutes filling buckets with water and trying to put out the fire. There is a severe lack of taps in this area so as each bucket was being filled there were 3 or 4 waiting to be filled. I tried my hardest not to twist my ankle on the many empty bottles and other garbage on the ground as I ran from the tap to the men waiting to grab the full buckets.
We were most worried that the fire would jump to the wood house that was very close to the shack, we made sure to throw water on the house and roof to keep it from burning. In the end the shack burned to the ground before the fire department arrived, but the other house was saved.
I was told that the fire started from the electricity, power "sharing" is very common here, when one house has power they usually share it with the shacks around them. The fire then traveled through the wire and into the house but was put out in time.
Sadly there were at least 6 people living in the shack who now have no home. Everyone is safe though.
Photo courtesy of westcapenews.com/?p=424 and is not a picture of the actual fire, but I wanted to give you an idea of what it looked like.
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