Page 55 - Rural Voice III - Responding to a Pandemic

Merweville food distribution
couldn’t afford to pay them. Hunger also became a big problem. SASSA [South African Social Security Agency] delivered food parcels, but most of the people in real need didn’t receive any. I don’t know who came up with the list of beneficiaries, because we as the advice office tried to intervene and sent names of the neediest to SASSA, but none of them received food parcels. SASSA delivered food to people who didn’t need it, and they in turn sold it to someone else.
projecTs and programmes in response To The covid-19 pandemic
Our biggest challenge was the lack of food, because most people went to bed hungry, as there was no income coming into the house.
SCAT actually helped our community a lot, because it made money available to all its partner LDAs to do food relief. At our office, we decided to give prepared food to the community instead of food hampers. We chose to cook food, because we would only have reached about 30 households if we had bought hampers with that little bit of money. So, if you look at prepared food, you can feed many more households. Every night, from July, we fed 96 people with healthy food, like mince and vegetables. People would come and collect the prepared food in buckets from the kitchen. We did this so that the people didn’t go to bed hungry at night.
We tried to network with all organisations in our community to see how we could actually relieve the hunger problem, but most organisations didn’t have any finances to contribute.
The situation has since improved, because farmers have asked people to come to work again, as they can afford to pay them. Most of the people in our community are now working. There is also a road being built locally, which is providing employment for many people. A dam is going to be rebuilt, which will also employ more people. There was also a COVID-19 programme from the IDP [Innovation Development Progress], where they deployed people to do education about the pandemic at shops.
Food parcels distributed
368
COVID grant funding given to LDA’s
R 50 000
PPE distributed
400
RURAL VOICE III: RESPONDING TO A PANDEMIC
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