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An expert cleaner who has cleaned bathtubs full of human excrement and removed more than a tonne of urine bottles from homes has identified a rise in cases of hoarding.
Mufaro Mpanda, 63, a former London Transport employee, has been running specialist cleaning service, Pocket Rockets, with his niece, Melissa Chiyangwa, 30, since 2023.
pair behind essex The franchise has been called upon to clear the houses of hoarders and drug addicts, and to clean up the scenes of violence or suicide.
In recent months, he has had to clean bathtubs full of human feces and remove more than a ton of urine bottles from the property, making Mufaro realize how important it is to check on vulnerable people in the community.
“Hoarders are people and often they don’t understand that the way they live is not normal,” Mufaro – who is also the founder of the Hope for African Communities charity – said.
“Hoarding causes mental health problems, and we really need to raise awareness about it.
“It’s very important to check vulnerable people, not just over the phone, because often they seem fine over the phone, but in person. Then they can seek help quicker.”
Mufaro has always loved helping people.
Birth zimbabweShe arrived in Britain in 1999.
“At that time, there were a lot of problems in Zimbabwe. The government was driving white people out of the country. I was against it, so I had to flee as a refugee,” she said.
He said he was welcomed in Britain and – apart from the weather – enjoyed settling into his new home.
he got a job tfl and worked as a station supervisor for 17 years.
Although she always went out of her way to help friends and family, in 2012, she decided to set up a charity – Hope for African Communities (HAC) – to provide services to vulnerable people from ethnic minority communities.
As well as various projects to help refugees and asylum seekers settle in Britain, HAC funded and built a primary school in a deprived area of Zimbabwe.
“It has six classrooms and it’s in an old farmhouse that was abandoned after the owners were murdered,” she says.
“We are trying to secure funding because we need to build more schools in Zimbabwe. It is a need.”
In 2020, during Covid, noticing that many people were struggling, Mufaro set up a registered food bank in Basildon with Melissa.
Today, it has 80 registered weekly visitors and Mufaro hopes the number will cross 100 next year.
Many of the food bank’s users are mothers with young children, who most appreciate basic needs such as toiletries and baby food.
“Charity is not like a business,” Mufaro said.
“In business, it doesn’t matter whether people appreciate. But when you do some charity for someone, you feel it in your heart.
“We don’t want the glory, we just want to make sure kids can eat and go to school.”
In 2023, Mufaro and Melissa founded a biohazard and trauma cleaning business because they saw there was a need in the community.
He created a franchise of Pocket Rockets, a specialist cleaning company based in Lincoln.
The work they do is difficult and often shocking, especially when they have to clean up after a violent scene, an unintentional death or a suicide.
They approach each with positivity and passion, working closely with families to ensure the job is done professionally.
The pair say the most challenging part is working with hoarders. according to NHSHoarding disorder is “where a person acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a disorganized manner, usually resulting in an unbearable amount of clutter”.
“Many of these people have spent 20 years accumulating clutter,” Melissa said.
“It gets very dense but they don’t want you coming to pick it up because it’s their stuff.”
He said he often has to be patient when he is called for a job, only to find that the boss refuses to let him in.
“Sometimes it can take up to a month of talking on the phone to get them comfortable and trusting enough to come into the home,” she said.
Once trust is achieved, removing the goods is still a laborious and often expensive process.
Emotional support is needed at every level.
It recently took five people nine days to get an elderly man’s home back to clean and livable condition.
Every item had to be lifted carefully and the house was damaged due to a lot of disarray, with the plumbing also completely broken.
“They’ve had this situation for 20 years and we’re trying to fix it in nine days,” Melissa said, adding that the problem isn’t the filth but the hoarder’s mental health.
In another recent job, the pair had to clean the house of someone who had spent years defecating in bathtubs and urinating in bottles.
“All the bottles weighed over a ton,” Mufaro recalled.
“We still wonder how they can live like this with the smell, eat food there and think everything is OK. But that’s why we really need to raise awareness about these issues.”
Mufaro considers her cleaning role partly charitable as much of it involves helping people out of difficult situations.
Despite often overwhelming hardships, she believes she and her niece are doing important work to help vulnerable people.
He says he’s always looking for companies and clients to work with and encourages people to get in touch.
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