During April 2020 when our country was going into full scale Lock down, we were selected by the Independent Development Trust to administer the Covid 19 Response Programme for the South African Government in the Southern Cape. This came as no surprise for me, because 17 years back I wrote, as part of our objectives the following statement ‘”To render aid to disaster areas whether its National or International”. The fact that it happened on our domestically and all around the globe was a surprise.
Although it was a huge task with tremendous risk it came with great satisfaction to be part of the front liners and too serve my country in such a way. We had to employ 213 youth covering 12 towns in the Southern Cape, their duties range from assisting schools and government buildings with social distancing and covid19 awareness. To Combating Gender Base violence in communities, by empowering Victims and gathering information by means of a GBV survey, over 9000 interviews were conducted.
In addition to this more than half of the community that we serve were day labourers. Prior to the Covid19 pandemic we distributed 500 food portions daily. During the outbreak our ratios doubled that’s besides our daily breakfast feeding programme. We were also responsible for the distribution of PPE’S in the different towns (Mosselbay, Great Brak River, Uniondale, Waboomskraal, Herold, Albertinia, Gouritzmond, Stillbay, Riversdale, Heidelberg and Slangriver) that we serviced. Long nights on the road and late night food preparation was on the order of the day. There was also a emergency extraction of an lady and her twin babies and relocated them to a different town, after they were exposed to GBV. What normally take months to accomplish took us a couple of hours as their lives were at risk. The project started in April 2020 and ended in November 2020.
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