My name is Wonga Zono. I’m a student at COSAT .

I am a civilian that lives in the shacks of Site B in Khayelitsha with an ambition of fulfilling his dream. That dream is not to run away to live in the suburbs (what a lot of people do when they make it out of the township) while the people I grew up with are still living their lives in a poor environment. People often tell us stories about how people are struggling through poverty because they are looking at shacks from the wrong side and these became bedtime stories. YES! Shacks also have the right side, which is why I decided to write about my life.

It starts when I started living in the shacks of Khayelitsha where someone gets shot dead in front of your eyes and when cops ask who killed him, you would say “I don’t know” because the thought of you also being killed would run through your veins as if the heart is pumping them, when we were about 8-10 years old we were already smoking what was called “Glue” which we bought for about R10. We would sit in a water Tap that was round in shape and we would smoke that drug for fun, this was the only wrong thing that I have ever seen in my community.

When time past and we were about 12-13yrs, we were still smoking so the people in Site B called a community meeting discussing what we were doing, then the cops were involved. What was funny was that we never listen to the people, the police even our own parents not knowing that life will be like hell to us for the upper coming years.

We decided to quit Glue when we were all 14-15 and started a new life in sports. We played soccer and discovered that we were really good and we got a coach that had real experience in coaching but his problem was that he was selling weed, we went to him because we thought he would supply us with money not knowing that he would steal the money and the sponsorship we were getting so that we can play in the grassy field, we were use to play in the sandy fields”
My brother, the guy I believed to be my role model, was the most caring person at home. He was about 22 and was working at the Grand West Hotel, he was the General Manager of that that place, but he didn’t last there because he got arrested and did almost 6 months in prison. Then when he got out he was fired and had to work in a TOYOTA garage, he was also fired there for fighting then he returned to the streets of Khayelitsha. He smoke Heroin, Tick-tick and he is now serving 6 yrs for house breaking but he has done 2yrs in trial and will now do 2 years and the other two in probation. After that we heard that he was the Brain and the head of all the drugs that came in our community in short you can call him “THE DRUG LORD”.

The above were a few details of what the bad side of my life was like; now its time for the good things and they start of at home. I went to Ajax Cape Town soccer trials but was not taken because I was young and didn’t have an ID, but the coach told me that I was very good at soccer and he said that I should not give up.

As time went by my community was becoming more interesting because I would often see people smoking Drugs in front of their parents. The drug invasion in my community was started by the people that are fathers to us children, then was passed to the people we call our big brothers and then to our selves. But I am always lucky because I didn’t smoke all those Drugs. Me and some of my friends go to a youth church that always starts at 7pm and ends at 8pm so we do have a life that we consider to be the life of a shack living bachelor.

We have set a goal that we would not take the short way in life but take the hard, long and painful side of life. We have promised our selves to get proper Jobs, then before living our lives in the suburb we will first let our children experience what we have experienced in our child hood so that they don’t think that they are better than other people ‘for we have saved for them a life never lived.

Here is a picture of a weed smoking guy in my community.

Here are some of the people that I go to Church with besides the smoking guy.

here is a gangster that grew up with my brother

Here is “The Drug Lord” my Brother