In honour of Youth Month Health-e News asked community journalists to tell us about the biggest issues facing young people in their community. This submission is by Tholakele Mbonani from Ekurhuleni.

Once upon a street in Duduza, laughter echoed. Children played with bare feet and wild hearts. The sun-kissed tin roofs and dreams were stitched into the sky with kites made from old plastics and rods. Hope lived here not perfectly, but proudly.

But that was before the dust turned dark.

Now, if you walk these same streets, you will not see those children. You will see ghosts, boys with swollen feet and sunken cheeks, girls with hollow eyes and burnt-out dreams. You will see shadows sifting through dustbins, not for treasure, but for food. You will smell smoke, not from fires of warmth, but from substances that steal the mind and break the soul.

This is the story of my community

It’s a story poisoned by nyaope, by crystal, by whatever new name death is wearing today. Drugs came into our streets like thieves in the night, and they did not just steal our children; they erased their names. Once called Thato, Sindi, Jabu… now they’re just “Onyaope”… the ones we fear, the ones we avoid, the ones we stopped praying for.

We say they are the problem. We forget they were once the promise.

As expensive as these drugs are, they cost far more than money. They’ve taken futures, shredded families, and planted graves where gardens should grow. They’ve become a new pandemic, a silent, unspoken one. And like most pandemics, it did not ask permission. It came for us all.

Every household now holds a quiet sorrow. An uncle who disappeared. A sister who steals to survive. A son who speaks to voices only he can hear. You cannot live in Duduza and not carry a piece of this grief.

But this story is not just a tragedy.

Because somewhere in that dust, there is still a heartbeat. There are grandmothers still waiting on porches with plates of food. There are little ones still playing soccer barefoot, their joy undimmed. There are old friends who still say: “We can fix this. We must.”

There are mothers who cry, but also fight.
There are youth who fell, but want to rise.
There are voices, like mine, telling this story not to shame, but to remember.

We remember them not as junkies, but as children who once had dreams. And in remembering, we resist the lie that this is all we will ever be.

So, this is the story of my community, a place cracked by poverty, poisoned by drugs, but not yet buried. – Health-e News