Nutrition and Catering (Agriculture)

This morning started with another lecture by Varkey George. In order to get a deeper understanding of what he teaches, the Kusasalethu Group was invited to present more about their social enterprise. Kusasalethu is a Xhosa word that means "Our Tomorrow". Xhosa is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. The founders Peace Boza and Bongani Makeleni were born in the township "Khayelitsha" and after having studied and found jobs, they want to give back to the community through several projects. 

One of the projects is Bag of Hope. It is for children in primary schools, who are facing many life challenges such as drugs, gang violence and poverty. Often school is the only place where they can escape and focus their minds and energy on something positive. Education is of fundamental importance when it comes to uplifting them to build better lives for themselves, especially at this young age. But often they do not even have a bag to carry their school books and use plastic bags to carry them. That is why the Kusalethu Group wants to donate as much school bags as possible for the children - to make their everyday school life easier.

The second campaign, #ibuypads, was already presented in this blog on Saturday. For more information please visit: http://kusasalethugroup.com.

Because of the sunny and warm weather today, some of the students spend their afternoon at the Camps Bay Beach. They relaxed, did some yoga or went swimming in the fresh cold ocean.

Nutrition and Catering (Agriculture)

The nutrition and catering team consists of Julia, Katharina, Daniel and Nicolas. 

Their work takes place in two projects of Etafeni’s Nutrition Department, which are home food gardens and catering. Etafeni establishes home food gardens for malnourished, HIV-positive, tuberculosis affected or vulnerable people living in the Nyanga community. The main goal is to ensure food security and providing a portion of vegetables to the people several times per week. The challenges the home food garden project is facing are limited funds, staff and materials. Also pests and water scarcity are problems. In this project, the team members try to find possible ways to reduce costs and improve the situation for the home food gardeners as well as to develop an income-generating strategy for self-sufficient home food gardening. The second project is the catering of Etafeni’s beneficiaries. The on-site garden provides vegetables for Etafeni’s kitchen which serves 350 meals per day. Over here, we address stock system issues aiming to ensure an efficient process.

Nicolas: "We highly appreciate the given opportunity to work in the gardening project. We truly believe in the method of self-sufficient gardening to break the cycle of poverty and lead the way towards a sustainable flourishing community in Nyanga."