She woke up early as she usually did and was at her workplace in Gaborone North, where she works as a domestic worker. It was a little after 10 am, just as she was taking the laundry out of the washing machine, that the day changed into one she fears she can never recover from. Around that time, she received a phone call from Mmamashia; officers from Kgatleng Land Board had arrived at the settlement with 'yellow monsters' and were razing her two-roomed house down to the ground.
"I almost died," she tells The Monitor in an interview. In hindsight, she realises that it was probably better that she wasn't there when her house, the first to be demolished in the operation, went down. "Nkabo ke bolaile motho. I wouldn't have stood by and allowed anybody to raze my house down, a house that I worked so hard for," she says. She relates that on that Friday, her employers hurriedly drove her down to Mmamashia where she found the remnants of the house that she, her partner and her five children have been calling home. The yellow monster had destroyed everything.
