of extremes

Next week, October 9 - 13 is National Nutrition Week in South Africa.

I help the Peninsula School Feeding Scheme to get the word out about the wonderful work thay do by writing a couple of press releases for them. I've written about therm before but is certainly worth mentioning them again, especially this week.

Children, like these at a school in Delft outside Cape Town, rely on the PSFA for what is often their only meal of the day. They are just a few of the 233 000 children in 633 schools in the Western Cape who would come to school hungry if it was not for the work this organisation does, coupled with a subsidy from the Department of Education.

October is also the month that includes World Food Day on the 16th, and National Obesity Week from the 15th to 19th.

South Africa has recently gained the dubious honour of being the third fattest nation in the world, and Cape Town has been declared the fattest city in the country. And yet, these children and hundreds who are not as fortunate, can be fed every day for just R370 a year. (about US$30)

If you want to help, call the PSFA office at (021) 447 6020, email info@pfsa.org.za or visit www.psfa.org.za for details.


Comments

Lee Labuschagne said…
The smiling faces say it all
4 October 2010 at 12:05
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the writer formerly known as...

Twenty years after I was born a Brooks, I became a Wilson in one of those happy-ever-after fantasies that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. But Wilson was a nice name, and eminently preferable to Brooks (which in Afrikaans means underpants or knickers and led to horrible teasing at school) and I quite enjoyed it. It was one of those anonymous names that everyone could spell and I liked the fact that it was totally normal at first look, but had a secret history. The great grandfather of the Mr Wilson I married had emigrated from somewhere near Moscow to the US and like so many others with unpronouncable or "difficult" names (I think it was Tobinofsky) he was given another one. One of the legends is that Wilson was chosen from the phone book, another is that he particularly admired a Wilson (couldn't have been Harold). So, for the next 25 years or so, I built my name and reputation as the journalist Lynne Wilson ... until I met and married my new happy-ever-a
Read more

Like faded flowers, thrown away: Steve Biko and the Boer women

Image
A Boer woman with her dead child, the last of her children to die, photographed by Emily Hobhouse The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months’ baby gasping its life out on is mother’s knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while,
Read more

mind the gap

I'm suffering from an excess of velleity. Velleity is volition at its weakest. It's a mere wish or inclination, without any accompanying effort. My velleity is fed by an overactive imagination... I can see in my mind's eye exactly what my dream garden looks like, for example. So when I am outside, I'm imagining a tree there, a shrub here, a winding path and a bank of flowers. so the lack of all those things and the lack of effort on my part to make them happen don't worry me so much. It certainly makes things easier when you are living with a very large garden during our excessively hot and dry summers. I'd write more... but what can I say? Velleity strikes again.
Read more