Left & found

It was November 2018, Cassandra Moodley’s first day as an in-service trainee at the International and Governance Relations Department at eThekwini Municipality. Standing in the gardens of the City Hall parking lot on what was then Aliwal Street in Durban, she suddenly realised she was in the very place where she had been abandoned 24 years previously, on a cold morning in July. Wrapped only in a piece of fabric, she still had her umbilical cord attached when she was discovered by the groundskeeper. Cassie has never met the man who found her, but it was from him that she got her birth name, Nonthlanthla.

Thandiwe Garrett isn’t sure exactly where she was abandoned, or when. In contrast to Cassie’s, hers was a safe abandonment, either in Somerset Hospital, where she was born, or on the steps of the local police station. Thandi, whose name means ‘one who is loved’, was