Caring for our Communities p 91 “Focus”

Caring for our Communities p 91 “Focus”

Helping Hands p91 “Focus” Definitions: 1. Environmental Justice means stopping people with few choices from being exploited. Poor people are often exposed to pollution, jobs hazardous to their health, and unequal access to resources such as housing, land, water and electricity.

2. Social Justice means setting right the situation where people with fewer choices suffer most from discrimination and human rights abuse.

3. Environmental Sustainability means to meet people’s needs in ways that do not damage or use up our environmental resources. Environmental resources are: • clean water • Air • Healthy soils and ecosystems Look after these for future generations.

Redress means making up for the inequalities of the past to redress past injustices where people were exploited, abused and discriminated against.

Scenario Dudu is 16 years old and in Grade 11. She lives in an informal settlement, called Freedom Village. Freedom Village is between a sewage farm, an oil refinery and a highway. Often the air smells bad. There is a strong smell of human waste, smoke from the oil refinery, and petrol and diesel fumes from speeding vehicles that drive past on the highway.

Dudu lives with her mother, younger sister and two baby brothers. They do not own a house or a plot. They had a house once in another town, but their father chased them away whe he married another woman. Dudu’s family live in a tiny shack made from pieces of corrugated iron, a few bricks, cardboard and plastic. There are about 500 of these small shacks in her village.

There is one tap that serves the whole community. This tap has been leaking for a few months. One day the municipality just cut off the water. Since then they have had to cart water from the next settlement. Dudu coughs a lot. Her mother has got TB. They stay far away from the clinic and Dudu’s mother does not always have transport money to go and get her tablets.

Dudu goes to school, but sometimes has to miss school because she is feeling weak from not having any food to eat. She often has to look after the babies and does not get time to do her school work.

Activity 1 Work in small groups: Write the answers in your workbooks. • Identify Dudu’s social and environmental rights that have to be redressed. • Discuss the social issues, such as lack of essential services and unequal access to basic resources, which Dudu is exposed to. • Explain what you think Dudu must be feeling.

4. What appropriate action could be taken to help Dudu?

Caring for our Communities p 91 “Focus”