Hundred-year old primary school still has pit toilets
Pupils at the school which was established in 1914, risk their lives by using open pit toilets.
The school principal, Tshifhiwa Netshisaulu says the health of educators and pupils is at stake because of exposure to the pit toilets.
Netshisaulu says the shortage of the toilets at the school, situated at Lukau village, which is wihtin walking distance to Tshilamba –Mutale Local Municipality is situated – compromises the health of 368 learners and 12 educators.
“This situation also disturbes our school programme as we must also monitor each and every child who goes to the toilet. We are forced to because some might fall into the open pit as they are very small.
“Many educators avoid going to the toilets because of the strong smell that is coming from there,” said Netshisaulu.
A grade seven learner said her parents advised her not to use the toilets unless it was an emergency.
Netshisaulu, who was also a learner at the school in 1970, says they alerted officials from the department who came to inspect the school two years back about the problem, but there’s been no solution.
“This problem has been there for too long. When I came here in 1986 as an educator there were no proper toilets. Even the classes are too old. We tried to raise money to build three toilets, but they are not flushing because there is no budget for plumbing,” says Netshisaulu.
Another educator who chose to remain anonymous says the situation at the school is also affecting the enrolment. “We have a very low registration here. Parents avoid sending their children because of the appalling situation at this school,” says the educator.
Approached for comment, spokesperson for the Department of Education, Pat Kgomo, says he was going to investigate and find out why there are no proper toilets at the school.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Hundred-year old primary school still has pit toilets
by ndivhuwomusetha, Health-e News
July 29, 2013
Related
Limpopo youth pitch water-saving cell phones to world
Imagine if you could save litres of water with the touch of a button. Limpopo learners have and recently presented the innovative idea to the world at the Stockholm Junior Water Prize.
New ambulances for Limpopo
The province has received 60 new ambulances and another 40 ambulances worth more than R40 million are expected to be distributed between the province’s five districts with a year.
Load shedding, winter expected to fuel burn injuries
A new, viral social media campaign is encouraging South Africans to “burn for burns” as doctors warn that cold weather and load shedding are likely to prompt a spike in burn injuries this winter.