Good morning. I’m Alec Hogg and this is The Rational Perspective. Well, we’re in Cape Town as you can see from the shirtsleeves. It is sweltering here – probably 34/35 degrees and it hasn’t hit midday yet. Yesterday, I would have borne any kind of heat to have the experience that I did. We went to a place, called Christel House in Ottery. It is a creation of a lady, called Christel DeHaan. One of the richest people in America, she sold RCI, which is a timeshare operation (and many people in South Africa would know of it because it was quite successful in this country) in 1996, for $825m – more money than anybody I guess, ever needs to use in their lifetime. This lady came from abject poverty herself. She was born in 1942. Her father died. He was a German soldier. She was born in Bavaria. He died in a bombing raid when she was three years old. She had many difficult times growing up, and she just decided to devote her time, expertise, and charity to trying to address abject poverty.
She started a school in 1998 in Mexico City, two years after leaving RCI. The fourth of these schools – they’re all called Christel House, after her first name – was started here in South Africa and that’s the one, which we went to go and visit. What I like about it is that all of the investment made by any of the donors goes straight into looking after the kids. The kids are brought in from households that literally, don’t even have two cellphones. They can’t have a television set. If they do, they don’t qualify in the poverty scenario. There are more than 750 children at this school. It was an experience, which doesn’t leave you. These children have already had three years of graduate classes. Most of those went on to university and some of them are already graduating. 
What struck me about the Christel House Operation was that the reason why Christel DeHaan is keen to do it in South Africa was (a) because she feels like she needed to put back. RCI was a big and successful business in this country and (b) because she liked what she saw in the governance in the Western Cape. She has been trying to engage with Central Government officials – to no end. She wants to build a second school in Gauteng but they won’t even meet with her. This is a woman, who has met with Barack Obama, was called on by Bill Clinton, and South Africa… It’s good to see that there are people from all over the world, who are prepared to make an investment and to help address abject poverty, even if they don’t get the support that you would think, was obvious.
I’m Alec Hogg and this is The Rational Perspective.
