Generosity of spirit has been displayed by many South Africans with news surfacing of hungry communities in the country being plunged into deeper poverty as Covid-19 has taken its toll on the economy. People have pitched in to raise money for food and do-gooders have swooped in to distribute bags of donations across South Africa. One woman from Johannesburg has realised that all this giving is not enough. Founder of Boikanyo: The Dion Herson Foundation, Marilyn Bassin has relentlessly sought to find the deep rural areas that others may have missed, and she has trawled the internet to find charity organisations who may need help. Bassin started ‘Save a Soul’, a project focused on SA hunger during the Covid-19 lockdown, with Rose Kransdorff to provide e-Pap – a porridge that provides nutrition in small portions – to impoverished communities. She told BizNews that she found communities who had not received any help, in a heart-wrenching story about how Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on many people. – Linda van Tilburg
“We started in the urban areas giving hand-outs. Within a month, they were coming back and saying, we want more, we want more. But my passion, my heart is with the people out there, who have no voice and as soon as the first person came back and said, we need more, I said, we are out of the urban areas. So, you know, where are we going? We’re going rural, but we’re going deep, rural. We’re going to places nobody has even heard of…to the places where there are no voices.”
Bassin described what she found in the deep rural areas as “terrible”. She said the areas that she visited were two hours from a town, where there were no roads and what they found, was that there were no food parcels or any form of assistance. “There was a study done in February this year and it showed that children in the Jozini area, the uMkhanyakude area of Kwazulu-Natal, Pongola and all the way up to the Mozambican border are three to five times hungrier than anywhere else in South Africa. We went there and it was shocking. We also went west of that to Mbutu, there aren’t any non-governmental organisations in that area assisting.”
What Bassin could not understand was that people were accepting that this was their lot. “They had literally nothing in their kitchens, starving animals and some of the areas did not even have dogs. Dogs live off little scraps that are thrown to them. Where we went last week…up to northern Kwazulu-Natal, Manguzi area, there were no dogs. I reckon they have died. It is just so terrible. You say, food, and the people just open up their arms and shake their heads.”
“There was one family in particular, we went early in the morning and the children had brought a pot of last night’s leftovers of pap and some gravy. Two young ones were sitting outside, and they were feeding the baby, and everyone was dipping their hands in and feeding the baby, because the rule of that household is that only babies get food today. They were licking their fingers so that they could taste something.”
Donations slow
What worries Bassin most, is that donations have started slowing down. “People have stopped donating, they’re tired and they haven’t got any more money. At first, there was a massive rush and now there isn’t any more money. It’s trickling in.” She said it was time for the government to take over…We need to feed these people. This is terrible. These children are never going to recover!” she said.
“It is not only the children; it is grandmothers as well. We’ve met families where the one grandmother was looking after 20 grandchildren, five of her own children had died and she had been looking after 20 of them on an old age pension….No-one can manage that! These are people who qualify for assistance.” Bassin said she was also worried about the foreign nationals who have received no assistance.
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Save a Soul’ teamed up with e-Pap from the beginning of the pandemic to feed the hungry. It is a porridge that has the entire recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals plus carbohydrates and proteins. It is not an entire meal but is enough to keep people alive. “With every drop-off we gave, people have at least enough to last for 30 days so that they can have at least have something if in the in-between days, they had nothing else to eat.”
Bassin and her team have fed 100,400 children so far and, when BizNews spoke to her, she had just received another donation of R200,000 which will be enough for four more tonnes of food. She said she would search for another area where hunger was a problem. To liaise with charities who are looking for food donations, Bassin spends time on the Internet to find NGOs. They have to adhere to specific criteria to make sure they can carry out the job. “They have to have transport and care givers who go out and they have to have a data base because when we deliver, we deliver so much.”
Covid, poverty and the local heroes and heroines who are helping the poor
Asked whether international NGOs were helping in South Africa, Bassin said she had never relied on international NGOs, but she has been overwhelmed by the generosity of many South Africans and the “phenomenal people she has met”. She listed some the people and charities she has been working with whom she described as “blooming heroes” which included:
- Doctor Coen Louw, who gave up his practice in Johannesburg to work in the Mopani area of Limpopo to education people on health and nutrition. “Whenever I have a drop-off for him, he sends an Uber to collect it from me and somehow it gets there.”
- Dr Ingrid Le Roux and her son, who have assisted thousands of mothers and young children. “Their focus is on just growing and raising health children. She’s got the most phenomenal set-up in the middle of Zukeleli and Coffee Bay.”
- Dr André Hattingh, who Bassin described as an “incredible man” who trained in the US but decided to come back to South Africa to start Pediatric Care Africa for children who do not have access to medical treatments.
- The Woodrock Animal Rescue, “who went in the middle of the night to visit animals in areas that could be too dangerous for them and to drop off dog food.” This was near a squatter camp in Zandspruit where she said people were dumping their animals, because they could not afford to feed them. It was also a result of rumours that Covid-19 was transmitted by animals. Bassin said animal charities had experience a sharp drop in donations during Covid-19.
- Graham Alexander, who runs the Rotary Club in Umtata “who drove hundreds of kilometres with e’Pap in his car to places where he knew that nuns had all died because they had no food to eat.”
It costs about R80 to feed an adult for three weeks, but the same amount can feed two children for 40 days. Bassin said she had R200,000 from one organisation that had supported her since the beginning, but after that she did not know how she would continue the feeding scheme.
SA hunger: the forgotten people
She believed there were still millions and millions of people that need to be fed and said she would continue searching for these people who seemed to have been forgotten like the community she found two weeks ago in Manguzi after a 14 kilometre hike up a mountain with an NGO. She said there had to be many more communities like this in South Africa. “The government knows, because these children are registered in local clinics. They have clinic cards… It’s not hidden from the government, but it is nice to hide, to pretend that they don’t exist.”
Bassin spoke of her anger to hear that millions of rand went missing during the Covid-19 pandemic. “You try so hard to make a difference and the people who are the ones entrusted with funds, how dare they? What happened years ago, somehow you can say, today things are transparent. Well really? It has happened within the last month or two. Some of these contracts awarded to individuals were in July and August. How does that happen? Who did it and where is that money? We need the money back!”
For the foreseeable future, Bassin is trying to raise as much money as she can to carry on feeding. She said as the feeding by many charity organisations is tapering off, she did not know who would be stepping in as the hunger has not gone away.
