Udani Samarasekera

BONGANI PHAKATHI was sixwhen his aunt accidentallyplunged his face into a largepot of boiling water.

She was trying to treat Bon-gani’s cold and cough, said Mit-tah Lekaba of Children of Fire,a charity that helps childrenwith burns to get treatmentand care.

His aunt had boiled thewater for Bongani to inhale thesteam. She covered him andthe pot with a towel and forcedhis head down. She thought thecloser he got to the water, thebetter it would be for his cold.

But she pushed too far. Bon-gani’s face went into thescorching water.

The accident caused severeburns to the boy’s face and

throat. Bongani, from EastRand, Johannesburg, was inhospital for months after theaccident. He had surgery onhis eyelids at Chris HaniBaragwanath Hospital because“he couldn’t close his eyeswhile sleeping”, said Lekaba.

“Sometimes there areatrophic scars” after burn acci-dents, explained Lekaba, her-self a burns survivor. Theseare deep scars that can leave adepression or hole in the skin.

Last year, Bongani’s motherapproached Children of Firefor further help with hisappearance.

“His mother brought him tous,” said Lekaba. “She waslooking for a place where hecould be accepted. She wantedus to take him in, make himlook better so he could go to a

normal school.”Bongani was not at school

at the time; he was not encour-aged to attend. “People, in gen-eral, are intolerant of disfig-urement. Teachers at schoolsaid he would disturb the otherchildren,” Lekaba said.

Children of Fire arranged

for Bongani, now eight, to haveplastic surgery at the RedCross Children’s Hospital thismonth, and he was flown toCape Town on Wednesday.

Bongani is very lively,despite his injuries andimpending operation. Waitingto see the doctor for an assess-

ment at the Red Cross yester-day, he ran around, climbing onbeds, playing with blinds andsteaming up a mirror with hisbreath to make patterns in thecondensation.

He falls quiet, however,when Lekaba puts a pressuregarment on his face. The spe-

cially-made garment is used toreduce the risk of keloids (hardskin) coming back, said Lek-aba. Bongani has to get used towearing it, as he will have towear it a lot after his operation.

Bongani’s surgery is due totake place on Monday. “Wewant to improve his neck, ears,

nose, and mouth,” said Lekabawho is accompanying Bonganion his life-changing trip.

“This operation will excisethe keloids on his face, makingit easier for him to open hismouth, and therefore making iteasier for him to eat, andsmile,” she said.

5NEWSCAPE TIMES FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2010

MERCY MISSION

Boy burntby aunt’sremedy incity for op

BRAVE FACE: Children of Fire’s Mittah Lekaba fits a pressure garment to Bongani Phakati’s face. Burn victim Bongani, 8, will have to wear this after plastic surgeryat the Red Cross Children’s Hospital this month. The charity flew him to the city from Johannesburg for the life-changing operation.. Picture: MATTHEW JORDAAN

New theories make a creator of the universe redundant – HawkingLONDON: God did not createthe universe, and the “BigBang” was an inevitable conse-quence of the laws of physics,the eminent British theoreticalphysicist Stephen Hawkingargues in a new book.

In The Grand Design, co-authored with US physicistLeonard Mlodinow, Hawkingsays a new series of theoriesmade a creator of the universeredundant, according to theTimes newspaper, which pub-lished extracts yesterday

“Because there is a law suchas gravity, the universe canand will create itself fromnothing. Spontaneous creation

is the reason there is some-thing rather than nothing, whythe universe exists, why weexist,” Hawking writes.

“It is not necessary toinvoke God to light the bluetouch paper and set the uni-verse going.”

Hawking, 68, who wonglobal recognition with his1988 book A Brief History of

Time, an account of the ori-gins of the universe, isrenowned for his work onblack holes, cosmology and

quantum gravity. Since 1974, the scientist has

worked on marrying the twocornerstones of modernphysics – Albert Einstein’sGeneral Theory of Relativity,which concerns gravity andlarge-scale phenomena, andquantum theory, which coverssubatomic particles.

His latest comments sug-gest he has broken away fromprevious views he hasexpressed on religion. Previ-ously, he wrote that the laws of

physics meant it was simplynot necessary to believe thatGod had intervened in the BigBang. He wrote in A Brief His-

tory ... “If we discover a com-plete theory, it would be theultimate triumph of humanreason – for then we shouldknow the mind of God.”

In his latest book he saidthe 1992 discovery of a planetorbiting another star otherthan the Sun helped decon-struct the view of the father ofphysics, Isaac Newton, that the

universe could not have arisenout of chaos but was createdby God.

“That makes the coinci-dences of our planetary condi-tions – the single Sun, thelucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass,far less remarkable, and farless compelling evidence thatthe Earth was carefullydesigned just to please ushuman beings,” he writes.

Hawking, who is only ableto speak through a computer-

generated voice synthesiser,has a neuro muscular dystro-phy that has progressed overthe years and left him almostcompletely paralysed.

He began suffering the dis-ease in his early 20s but wenton to establish himself as oneof the world’s leading scientificauthorities, and has also madeguest appearances in Star Trek

and the cartoons Futurama

and The Simpsons.The Grand Design is due to

go on sale next week. – Reuters

Staff Writer

IT WAS a dry winter, with lessthan half the long-term aver-age rainfall recorded in Julyand last month.

The Cape Town weatheroffice said the city receivedonly 40.3mm of rain in Julyand only 31.4mm in August.

The rural areas also didn’tget much rain.

According to Agri WesternCape, a farm in Franschhoekreceived 612.5mm between Jan-uary and August last year andonly 472.5mm during the sameperiod this year.

A farm in Breede Valleywent from 352mm last year to182.5mm this year.

Areas such as Mossel Bayare suffering because of watershortages.

Wolwedans Dam, MosselBay’s main water source, isdrying up, and it could be acracked mud patch by October.

The lack of rainfall over thepast two months has resultedin lower storage levels in themajority of dams around theWestern Cape.

Wemmershoek dam was sit-ting at 79.3 percent capacity atthe end of last month, against

99.7 percent last year. Steen-bras Lower dam was at59.1 percent with SteenbrasUpper at 94.6 percent, com-pared to 100.1 percent and100.8 percent last year.

Theewaterskloof dam hasgone down to 94.7 percentcapacity. Overall, the storagelevels for the Western Capehave decreased by 6.9 percentfrom last year.

Cape’s dry winter sees dam levels falling

City pupilsgrill actingenergy DGon nuclearambitionsMelanie GoslingEnvironment Writer

“YOU hold our future in yourhands, so do not leave us withincreased radioactive wasteby building more nuclearpower stations.”

This was the message froma group of high school pupilswho met Ompi Aphane, actingdeputy director-general of theDepartment of Energy, atReddam School in Tokaiyesterday.

The pupils, from Reddam,Hout Bay High and Waldorf,invited Aphane to meet themto discuss the government’sproposed expansion ofnuclear power stations, and toexplain why there was not agreater commitment to usingrenewable energy.

Aphane told the group thegovernment was looking at amix of different energysources. He said while nuclearenergy plants were expensiveto build, over a period of timethe relatively low running andmaintenance costs madenuclear energy “extremelyattractive”.

Anna Kent, in Grade 11 atReddam, said: “We keep onhearing the words, ‘reliable,safe and cheap’ (about nuclearpower), but from the researchI’ve done it’s none of thesethings. Have you forgottenChenobyl? We don’t want to beleft with that.”

Nosiphe Tomtala, in Grade12 at Hout Bay High, askedAphane what would happen tothe high-level radioactivewaste from the spent fuel fromnuclear power stations.

“You say it is cheap, but itis not true. The costs don’tcalculate disposing of nuclearwaste. It is always left out,”Tomtala said.

Aphane agreed that thecost of decommissioning anuclear power plant was high,adding that this was “a bignegative”.

However, he said the pupilsshould also consider theseadvantages of nuclear powergeneration: it did not emitcarbon, SA held some of theworld’s largest uraniumresources and it was reliableas a base-load power supply.

“If you relied on renewableenergy only, and Koeberg shutdown, all Cape Town’s lightswould go out,” Aphane said.

The government’sIntegrated Resource Plan wasbeing formulated and variousforms of electricitygeneration were beingconsidered. “Renewableenergy needs to form part ofthis… (but) you cannot run aneconomy like ours onrenewables,” he said.

‘The universecan and will create itselffrom nothing’

Legal blow to vuvuzela patent hopes

JOHANNESBURG: It wouldnot be legally possible topatent the vuvuzela, a lawyersaid yesterday.

“In the case of thevuvuzela, the concept of adevice through which a noiseis created by blowing into itwould have been supersededby prior horns. It would there-fore not be ‘patentable’,” saidDale Verster, an associate at

commercial law firm BowmanGilfillan.

At one stage, the vuvuzelacould perhaps have been pro-tected as a registered design,but the scope would have beenlimited, Verster said.

“At the date of its originalrelease, it is probable that theactual shape of the vuvuzelawas new and original. If not,the proprietor could have

altered its shape and configu-ration, added a pattern, orincluded some form of orna-mentation to the article tomake it new and original.”

But since the release of thefirst vuvuzela, numerous vari-ations have seen the light.

“This further hampers thepossibility of receiving a validdesign registration,” saidVerster. – Sapa