Page 49 - Rural Voice III - Responding to a Pandemic

CMAN community and office
Most of our other programmes were also affected. Our support groups had to stop, so we opened a landline every day for people to call us if they were in need of counselling or support. If people were in need of food parcels, they called us and the next morning we delivered to them. Our main concerns were children with malnutrition, people living with HIV/AIDS and TB patients, and people who could not work, for whom we would prepare cooked meals in a hall as part of our targeted feeding programme.
During lockdown level 5 when alcohol was not available, there was much less gender- based violence [GBV]. The moment alcohol was again available, GBV problems started. Our counsellor psychologist counselled rape survivors and our candidate attorney assisted them with laying charges and other legal work.
Our wellness centre in Paleisheuwel was open 5 days a week, and we distributed masks, hand sanitiser and soap bars to the community. We bought a lot of PPE [personal protection equipment] for the clinic and demonstrated the correct procedure for hand washing and social distancing. During our visits, we found a farm in Paleisheuwel where about eight families lived with no water or toilet facilities. We bought two 5,000 litre tanks and arranged for the municipality to fill the tanks with water every week. We also bought two concrete structure toilets from Cape Town and put them up for the families.
biggesT challenges
I think the hardest thing for us as an organisation was that despite our workload increasing, we had to cut salaries, because some of our funding contracts came to an end in April. Instead of saying “no we don’t want to work, because we are earning less”, the staff actually worked harder and faster and did better and better. That was really encouraging for us as management, because staff did not have enough for themselves, but they were supporting the people with food parcels.
Our staff were frontline workers in the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of doing HIV/ AIDS tests, our professional nurse was trained to do COVID testing and our six HIV/ AIDS counsellors were trained to do COVID screening. During level 5, they were out on farms. We screened farmworkers at 5h30 in the morning, and identified people with symptoms. Our staff also travelled to farms in the Bergrivier, Cederberg and Matsikama
Food parcels distributed
220
COVID grant funding given to LDA’s
R 50 000
PPE distributed
200
RURAL VOICE III: RESPONDING TO A PANDEMIC
49