The first thing that hits you in Pefferville, KuGompo City, is the smell.
It hangs thick and sour in the air, seeping into your clothes, your skin, your breath; an invisible cloud that residents say they have long stopped noticing because they have learnt to live with it.
Along Lanark Road, the ground glistens under the sun not from rain, but from streams of raw sewage snaking past homes, collecting in puddles that never seem to dry.
What was once a road is now barely passable, choked by filth and stagnant water.
Cars turn back, pedestrians pick their way through carefully, stepping over and sometimes through the sludge.
Children dart between houses, their laughter cutting through the heavy air, but their playground is a landscape of waste.
Just beyond the road, an overgrown field stretches out, thick with weeds.
Residents say it was once a sports ground, but now it is a swamp, fed by a steady flow of sewage that trickles down from the surrounding streets.
For 62-year-old Maria Turner, this is home and has been for more than two decades.
But home, she says, has become a place of sickness and despair.
“My backyard is always a swamp, standing just metres from a pool of murky water, edging closer to the house.
“The sewer pump overflows all the time. It never dries.”
She said inside her yard, the ground was soft and damp underfoot.
Turner’s voice trembles as she speaks about her three-year-old grandchild.
“She has a skin problem because of this and also a respiratory infection. I do not know how I am expected to keep a child safe in such an environment.
“I also struggle with asthma. This air is not right. It’s not healthy. But where must we go?” she asked.
Like many residents, Turner says she has reported the problem for years. The complaints, she says, have led nowhere.
“It is not just the smell. It’s the health risk,” Turner said.
“Children are playing near this sewage, and we are forced to walk through it every day. This is not a safe environment.”
Buffalo City Metro spokesperson Bongani Fuzile said the municipality had recently installed a 400mm pipeline in an effort to address the spillages.
However, he said vandalism and deliberate blockages had undermined progress.
“Several manholes have been vandalised, with individuals breaking into them in search of scrap metal,” he said.
“We have also found large stones and foreign objects placed inside, causing blockages.”
Fuzile said teams responded to reported spillages and were working on long-term solutions, including a community awareness campaign.
However, no clear timelines have been set.
For residents, those assurances feel distant, almost abstract, against the daily reality they face.
Here, the crisis is not in reports or plans.
It is in the air they breathe, the ground they walk on, and the stagnant water that surrounds their homes.
Community members warn that the combination of failing infrastructure, overcrowding and deepening poverty is pushing Pefferville towards a full-blown health disaster.
Across Pefferville, the story repeats itself.
Old, crumbling buildings line the streets, walls cracked, roofs sagging, windows patched together with makeshift repairs.
In between, informal structures have sprung up, crowding every available space.
Zinc sheets, wooden boards and plastic form homes for families with nowhere else to go.
The sewage, residents say, does not stay outside. It seeps in through yards, under doors, into living spaces.
Community activist Mandy Fortein said the social housing in the area was more than five decades old, there was no promise of rebuilding new structures.
“The double-storey shared homes are not conducive and not safe.
“The stairs are not stable, there have been children who have fallen [through stairs], because of the dilapidating structures.”
Fortein expressed how they felt neglected by the government.
“We have been pleading with the municipality to build new homes for us, even if it is temporary shelters.
“Some areas across the city are getting new, but we are left in the dumpsite.”
Electric wires hang low and exposed in front of homes, within easy reach of children.
In a place already defined by risk, they are yet another danger residents must navigate daily.
But beneath the collapsing infrastructure and overflowing sewage lies a deeper, more painful reality, poverty.
“The shacks in nearby informal settlements are more conducive than the old structures people live in,” Turner said.
Residents say the worsening conditions in Pefferville cannot be separated from the high levels of unemployment that have gripped the community for years.
With little to no income, families are unable to maintain their homes, relocate to safer areas, or even meet basic daily needs.
In many households, there is simply no money coming in. As a result, children are paying the highest price.
For many families, school feeding schemes have become the only reliable source of nutrition.
Pupils depend on the meal they receive at school as their main and sometimes only meal of the day.
Mother-of-five Mary-Anne Spogter lives in a shack with three of her children, who solely depend on the school nutrition programme for a fulfilling meal.
“I am unemployed and cannot afford to buy food for my children, so I always encourage them to wake up early so they can get porridge and another meal during the course of the day,” Spogter said.
“I try to get piece jobs that will sustain their livelihoods, especially during the weekend. I would rather eat a quarter loaf of bread and water.
“When schools are closed, you see the real situation.
“Some children go to bed hungry because there’s nothing at home. Their parents are not working.”
The founder of a local NPO, Doreta Prins, said hundreds of residents queued at her organisation on days when she handed out food.
“There are more than three organisations within the area, because of the situation that is happening in Pefferville,” Prins said.
“Poverty is a dire struggle in our community, people are in need of help.”
Young people are often seen in groups sharing a two-litre bottle of alcohol or smoking cigarettes.
The youth of the area feel left behind as they see themselves as not having access to any form of employment.
It is demoralising, because we want to improve our livelihoods, but our leaders are not helping
Twenty-year-old Algranto Botha said young people were not afforded a chance for employment, instead the employment was given to older people.
“There are projects that are [arranged] by BCM, but they are always given to older people, or people who do not live in our area,” he said.
“It is demoralising, because we want to improve our livelihoods, but our leaders are not helping.”
In Pefferville, the crisis is not a single failing but a chain of neglect that touches every part of daily life, from the air residents breathe to the food on their tables.
Until meaningful, sustained intervention replaces promises, the community remains trapped in a cycle where poverty, decay and health risks feed into one another — and where the cost of inaction is measured not in reports, but in the lives and futures of those forced to endure it.
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