The house looks like a crime scene. It is hard to believe it has only been vacant for a month. The air is full of dust. Ashes of burnt newspapers lie on the lounge floor. Couches are in tatters. A framed 2002 Galaletsang Day Care Centre graduation Certificate on one side of the wall tells a story. Right next to it a dusty black and white clock with the hands stuck at 1127 hours. There’s another one way above the fire place also fixed at 0424 hours. Just below the clock is an old painting of The Last Supper and a dusty photo of a bubbly toddler. On the right side as one picks his way through the lounge there’s a three legged dining chair and a dusty old fridge in the dining room. A few steps into the hallway and there is a kitchen on the right. It looks like it has just survived a sand storm. All doors of the kitchen cupboard are wide open. It’s like a scene from The Haunted Mansion.
The two children’s rooms down the hall are like the fallout of a violent tornado; Clothes scattered all over the floor. There is also a gigantic 1980’s wood surround effect television set just by one of the bedroom doors. An FHM poster of SA’s top model Lee Ann Liebenberg hanging in one room suggests it once belonged to a teenager.
A Tom and Jerry paper bag on the other also tells a story of its own. The sliding glass door on the master bedroom is broken and replaced by a dirty makeshift dark curtain. Everything from the bath tub to the toilets and closets are broken. Outside, in front of the house, there is a white plastic chair just by the wall with the book ‘The Joy of Trusting in God’ by Bill Bright on the seat.
The book looks like it has been soaked before, and weathered many a storm. There is also an abandoned maroon 2000 Toyota Hilux 2.7 bakkie as one enters the gate. The tires are flat, windows wide open, and a couple of stock bricks where the gear levers used to be. Up until a decade ago, in 2005, this three bedroomed house in Gaborone Block 6 was a happy family home where Pontsho Maano* lived with her father and two sisters. Her mother had passed on just two years earlier when Pontsho was just 10 years old. Her father would pass on when she was just 13 years and doing standard 7.
Her younger sister Tapiwa* and older sister Tendani* were 10 and 17 years old respectively. Tapiwa had just graduated from kindergarten when the mother passed on. Sunday Standard caught up with the now 24 year old Pontsho who wants to use her experiences to help all the other voiceless orphans across the country. She says soon after her father’s funeral in 2005 his younger brother (Pontsho’s uncle) came over to live with the sisters.
“He moved into my father’s master bedroom and started using my dad’s stuff.” The girls had barely known the uncle before their father’s death. She says the uncle assumed their father’s role and even wore his clothes. The sisters’ maternal aunts and uncles had suggested the house be put up for rent and the girls be moved to a smaller apartment so the children could live off the rent money, but the paternal uncle would have none of it. The uncle spent most of what was left of their father’s funds on alcohol. “He did not buy food,” Pontsho tells Sunday Standard Lifestyle. The uncle would come home drunk at night and demand food from the girls. “My older sister and I had to find ways to come up with money for food and transport. I started getting involved in sexual relationships at a younger age because I needed my boyfriends to provide the little they could for us.” She pauses for a moment, and turns away as tears roll down her cheeks. “Excuse me; this conversation just brings back painful memories.”
Pontsho however says she did not get involved with grown men. “I got involved with guys my age not least because they had parents who provided for them.” Pontsho and her sisters did not get pocket money for school. The girls struggled for transport money to school even though the uncle drove around in their father’s bakkie.
“We missed school sometimes because we did not have money for transport.” She says the uncle always beat them up and abused them emotionally. At one point the uncle brought in a friend to live with them. The man tried to rape her. “He wanted to take advantage of our desperation.” She says following her father’s death no proper procedures were followed to divide his estate among his daughters. The father had a business, an office, three motor vehicles, and cattle. All that remains of them is the scrap of the Hilux the uncle broke down. “Ten years now and we have no idea where all that stuff went,” Pontsho says. Some of the girl’s paternal relatives helped themselves to what remained at the house. From television sets, computers, kitchen appliances, and furniture. “They took everything.” The girls had to move out of their father’s house to escape the abuse. Pontsho was pregnant when she sat for her BGCSE examinations in 2010.Her son is now six. She enrolled for a short course in management and currently works as a shop assistant. Her younger sister completed her BGCSE in 2014 and is still waiting to enrol for tertiary education. The oldest sister also works for a reputable financial institution. Pontsho and her older sister now live in their separate rented apartments. After witnessing the abuse the sisters had suffered over the years a neighbour recently introduced the sister’s to Masiela Trust Fund (MTF) Executive Director, Veronica Dabutha. Through her assistance they were able to evict the uncle from the house but not without a fight. “He claimed he had spent P60, 000 paying off debtors to save the house,” Dabutha told Sunday Standard Lifestyle. “But he only produced receipts amounting to P17, 000 which Masiela Trust Fund paid for him to vacate the house.” This is despite the fact that the uncle used his late brother’s money to pay off the debts. Now it is up to the sisters to decide what to do with the house. Dabutha says unfortunately Pontsho and her sisters’ is not an isolated case. “There are many such cases and we urge the public to report to us so we can assist these children.”
Through one of their Pillars ‘Invisible Children’, MTF aims to accelerate integration and mainstreaming of developmental needs of excluded and invisible children in Botswana. “Marginalized children are vulnerable and very often live at the periphery of society in conditions of abject poverty and deprivation. They are usually discriminated and find it difficult to adapt to community life. They are ignored and their needs are invisible because they are highly mobile and there are no structures or systems to support them.” Dabutha said the project focuses on raising the children’s voices through advocacy for social and economic integration and provision of services and flow of resources that assist them to increase their development assets. Masiela Trust Fund can be contacted at3191013/4. Their physical address is Plot 1239 Haile Selassie Road, Old Industrial Site, Gaborone.
