Chumani Pikoko is a car guard living on the streets of East London; he also suffers from TB.
He is stationed mainly on Oxford Street in Southernwood. The Daily Dispatch caught up with him last week as he was waking up from a nap on the pavement.
He is among hundreds of homeless people making a living on the city’s streets.
Pikoko has been on the streets since 2006, but since he was diagnosed his situation has become much worse.
I do take my treatment but I sometimes default because I stay on the streets. I sometimes lose my pills, or sometimes when I have them I don’t have food to eat first, and then I end up defaulting
“I do take my treatment but I sometimes default because I stay on the streets.
“I sometimes lose my pills, or sometimes when I have them I don’t have food to eat first, and then I end up defaulting.
“I am not supposed to take pills without eating first.”
He is originally from Ntabozuko (formerly Berlin) and says he had to leave home to try to make a living because no-one in his family worked apart from his father who occasionally got part-time jobs.
“We live on the street so when we beg for money, some people don’t believe that we want money for food so that we can take our treatment.
“They say, ‘no he wants to buy drugs’. That’s the type of life we are living.”
He sometimes goes back home when he has made good money.
Pikoko said when he lost his medication he had to go back to the clinic.
At the clinic they had to produce an exercise book in which health officials could write down their particulars, including the required medication.
“Sometimes you don’t have the money to buy the exercise book. We have to beg for money first.”
The last time he went to a health facility they diagnosed acid reflux and he was given medication, but this has since run out.
“Yes we do smoke but we don’t lie about our illnesses on the street,” he said.
If you look at my blanket, it’s small. We also steal from each other. If I left it here, someone else would take it and I would go months without a blanket
He believed he got TB as a result of sleeping rough.
“If you look at my blanket, it’s small. We also steal from each other.
“If I left it here, someone else would take it and I would go months without a blanket.”
Xolani Qavile said he had been living on the streets for over a year after leaving home due to poverty and ill-treatment.
“Sometimes when you stay at home and you are without your parents, just siblings, nothing goes right. When you don’t work, you are a nobody.”
So he decided to live on the streets, making a living collecting cans and scrap metal.
Qavile said he visited a clinic in Nahoon and had not had any problems with the nurses.
“I have been to the clinic twice, because I was coughing a lot, and I was afraid of this thing about coronavirus, and also TB.
“Where we stay there is a lot of dust because of the fires we make.
“At the clinic I just told them I wanted to be tested.”
The tests came back negative.
Lwandile Sakhile (not his real name) lives in an informal settlement near the end of Buffalo Street.
He used to work in construction until he injured his leg. Now he lives with constant pain and he limps.
It is difficult to go up the steep slope that leads out of the informal settlement.
“Previously, we used a car from church to take us to hospital and back,” he said.
The informal settlement is hidden in bushes and the pain is particularly bad in cold, wet weather.
“It’s really painful in winter. I feel it when it’s about to rain and I don’t even wake up [those days],” he said.
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