A real exercise!

On our way to a march at the SABC, Chris (Citizen reporter) and I get a call from the office, a bus is on fire near Lenasia, so we turn around and speed off towards where this bus is, eventually we come to some traffic. Taking a chance, I lean out of the car window and call a Metro-Police officer over, I explain that we're from the press, hoping that he will tell us how far the bus is away from us, he promptly stops all the cars and ushers us through, So, now we have the highway to ourselves and I'm telling Chris how astonished I am that we got that response from the police. We come up to the scene and stop, I jump out and run to the flames, after about a minute it dawns on me that even thought this scene includes two busses and a tanker on fire, there is no injured people around, but I carry on moving around shooting, then Chris comes up to me and says "Its a play", only then do I realise that the whole incident is a exercise to test the response of the emergency services.... Guess it was also a test for us... Maybe I should have cottoned on when I seen the spray paint on the tanker "Out of Order".

Refugee camps

A lone guard watches the empty tents of the Kaserne refugee camp near Johannesburg. The old Kaserne shunting station will be used to house thousands of refugees that fled from xenophobic violence recently .

The soon to be populated Kaserne refugee camp is in an old shunting yard in Johannesburg, but at least it has a roof, and the UNHCR tents are a far cry from the ones that most of these people had recently (if they were lucky!). The whole situation is really dire, these people cannot do anything to help themselves and will probably stay in these camps for a long, long time.