barefoot.

After I traveled to South Africa in the winter of 2018 for documentary filming, I became inspired to write multiple short story and poetry pieces on what I had seen. The one area of South Africa that stuck in my mind was Langa. Langa, a suburb of Cape Town, is one of the poorest towns in South Africa. People walk around in ragged clothes, barefoot, and live in tin houses littered with trash.

My group and I had traveled to the town of Langa to get footage of the people and their water supply. When we were in South Africa, Cape Town was dangerously close to hitting “Day Zero.” This means they were extremely close to running out of clean water, for good. This obviously impacts all communities, especially those that do not have a lot to begin with.

When we got there, and I saw children playing soccer with a small bouncy ball, I grew sad. I got as many videos as I could of the water filling stations, which were just hoses or rusty pipes sticking out of the ground. I wanted to help everyone, but how do you save a whole town from something like that?

Instead, I decided to write about it. I thought that if I wrote something that could help the reader picture Langa, they would want to help too. This poem came to me after I returned to the states. I felt I had to let people know just how bad it is in towns across the world.

Here is a link to donate to Love to Langa. This organization is working to build schools for the children of this poverty-stricken area of Cape Town.

My poem, dedicated to poverty-stricken Langa, South Africa, was published in Montage’s 2018 issue.