THIS HAS MADE ME BRAVE

Despite her horrific burns, acid attack survivor Londiwe is determined to face the world with a positive attitude

- SIPHOKAZI ZAMA

SHE finds it hard to look in the mirror. Every time she does, it feels if she’s looking at a stranger – her face is swollen and scarred and her right eyelid is so badly burnt she can no longer close her eye.

Tears stream down 19-year-old Londiwe Thabethe’s cheeks as she tells us how hard it has been for her to come to terms with what happened that horrific day in February.

Her whole life changed when she got into an altercation with two learners from her school and their mother, which allegedly culminated in them pouring acid over her.

“I do think of what I looked like before,” she says. “But I can’t go back in time – this is what I look like now,” Londi, as she’s known to her family, says resolutely.

Her only comfort is that she can go to court and look the people in the eye who allegedly did this to her.

“I’m basically training myself to not be scared of them. I want to show them that I’m powerful too,” she says.

What the matriculant from Charlottedale in KwaZulu-Natal is desperately hoping to find out in court is the reason for the alleged attack.

“I’ve never hung out with the girls; they’re just familiar faces because we live in the same area. The same goes for their mother,” Londi tells us.

Once she understands, she can move on with her life, she says.

THE teen was walking home from Groutville High School when she ran into her gran, Elsa Mpotshane. Elsa told Londi to collect her younger sister from her mom’s house and then to come home.

Londi and her siblings, Amahle (6) and Sibusiso (13), live with Elsa and her husband, Thomas, while their mother, Jabu, lives down the road in her own house.