Baphumelele House

Our last stop was at one of the large NGO social service projects in Khayalitsha.  We met Mama Rose, the founder of the project, and she told us how she got started in the 1980s, by finding an orphaned child on her doorstep, and then having the police bring her a second child.  She suddenly found herself caring for more and more orphaned and abandoned children, and the project was born.  As of today, the project has taken in more than 5000 children, who live on site or in private homes, or group homes.  What was once a tiny one room house in the middle of the township has expanded to take up about the equivalent of a city block and includes such things as foster care, hospice, a preschool, a soup kitchen, elder care, and a health center.  All this is done with help from partners and donations, as there is little government funding.

We had stopped earlier in the day at a grocery store where we bought a bunch of corn meal, beans, rice, onions, fruit, milk packs, and cooking oil.  This was our donation, which we hauled in off the bus and piled on a table in the small main office.  And then...we went to the baby room!  It was literally a room full of adorable babies!  These are the orphans and abandoned children who live there, and these were the youngest of the bunch.  There were 11 of them, and they wanted hugs, and patty cake and they wanted to touch our cheeks and grab our hair and they were generally the cutest babies in the world.  They are obviously well-fed and well-loved, and they were--all of them--very social, which suggests they get a lot of loving visitors.  Their room was small, with a tile floor and an 8 by 10 area rug.  There were colorful murals on the walls, and severals small bedrooms with 5-6 cribs in them.  It was not a fancy place, but it seemed like a happy place.  As we left, one baby broke free and toddled/ran after us for about 50 feet before being scooped up by a worker.  I'm pretty sure that it was just as hard on us to say goodbye as it was for that baby!

I'm not posting photos here, for privacy reasons, but I suspect the baby room was the highlight of the day!

Community Garden in Khayelitsha Township

This morning we went into one of the townships outside of Cape Town.  Cape Town is a famously beautiful city, but it has a secret.  The secret is that the other side of the mountain, totally hidden from the city, on the sandy flats, is where all the less wealth people live.  During apartheid, this is the area where they built the townships where Blacks were forcibly concentrated.  Now it's home to many poorer people, living in small houses, new government built housing, old shacks, and recently built informal housing (what we might call slums).  There are a number of townships here, and we spent the day in one of the larger and more vibrant ones, Khayelitsha.  There is a gleaming new hospital, relatively new schools, and stores amidst the brown-fields and shacks.  BMWs slip in with ancient beaten up cars on the streets.  We rounded a curve at one point and two men pushing a stained king sized mattress set on a single shopping cart were right in the road, the mattresses the size of a vehicle moving way under speed.

Our destination was an amazing community project, the SCAGA community garden.  This project teaches people to grow fruits and vegetables in their backyards, and gives the people of the community small garden plots.  They have also worked to create direct markets for the fresh organic vegetables that come from these gardens, which helps provide steady income to a number of people.  There are a number of garden spots in the townships sponsored by the NGO that operates this project and the one we visited was the oldest and most developed site.  It was amazing!  They had several buildings, some greenhouse tunnels, gorgeous garden beds in various stages of production, a seed and bedding room, and mature fruit bushes and trees.  This garden is an amazing oasis in an area surrounded by barren sandy ground and small tiny houses and shacks.

There was a team of people waiting for us, some of the 'mamas' from the community, the older ladies who have garden plots on site, and some of the younger newly trained farmers.  There were kids from the school across the street, who sang for us as we arrived.  We were welcomed by one of the administrators, and we broke up in teams to help work in the garden.  The high school students and mamas worked with us.  We had three tree-planting teams, a group who were planting trays of seeds, and a large group that was clearing beds and putting in seedlings.  We also carted compost to a new large indoor bed in the new greenhouse, for a 40 foot by 8 foot spinach bed.  We worked for a few hours, got dirty, talked with kids, used unfamiliar tools, and learned how to plant seeds, prep beds, and put in trees.  After we were finished, they served us a light lunch starring a very fresh salad made of veggies from their own garden.