Jack and Jill

The grandmother was left to care for five children after her daughter succumbed to the disease. Her old age pension and the child grants enabled them to survive in a state of poverty.

Her RDP house had a cold water tap but it had run dry more than a year ago. It was getting late in the day when she instructed the two eldest children to fetch a bucket of water from the well at the top of the hill. All of the villagers would have preferred a well at the bottom of the hill but were told that the Councillor’s nephew needed to drill an extra 400 metres to make the project worthwhile.

Jack and Jill climbed the hill to where the tank stood next to the borehole pump. There they encountered three men who had been smoking tik. These men beat Jack with a stick and their fists and then threw him down the steepest side of the hill. Jill was chased and caught.

When he regained his senses, Jack found himself lying in a bush and bleeding from a head wound he had sustained in the fall. Up he got and managed to stagger back to his grandmother’s house. Being concussed he was unable to tell her what had happened or where his sister was. The old lady had no first aid dressings and bandages, so she tore up a paper potato sack, soaked it in some vinegar and wrapped Jack’s head with it. Then she went to the neighbours to summon help. A man with a phone called the cops. Because the one police van had a puncture and no spare, and the other had gone to town to fetch supplies for the station commander’s spaza shop, they were only able to respond the following day. By then the villagers had discovered Jill’s body at the bottom of the hill.

All were in agreement that Jill would still be alive if the well had not been drilled at the top of the hill. The tender price should have been inflated by some other means, like double invoicing or falsifying the hydrological test results.

(From Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes)

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