A safe haven
Like many other parts of South Africa, Grahamstown’s challenges include illegal dumping, unemployment, inadequate access to health care, inadequate access to quality education, insufficient safe, suitable housing for our population, high crime levels in some areas, infrastructure that is falling apart and an unreliable water supply.
The most vulnerable people in our town – the poor, the very old and the very young – continue to bear the brunt of a long history of bad governance that began just over 200 years ago and has continued in various forms to various degrees.
The hope lies in the fact that there are organisations and individuals – some paid officials whose job it is, some activists and volunteers giving of their own time and resources – who are working hard to turn around the city’s fortunes, for the sake of its residents.
One of them is the Grahamstown branch of Child Welfare – an NGO that among other things provides a safe and loving environment for up to 18 vulnerable children between the ages of two and a half and 18 at the Ikhaya Losizo Cluster Foster Home Scheme. Each house is run by a caring and dedicated foster parent. The homes represent a move from a hostel-type environment to a cottage system, where there’s a mom and a few children. Ikhaya Losizo offers a normal family environment instead of an institutional one.
The aim is to equip each child with everything they need for a happy, confident and productive life, despite their difficult start.
Grocott’s Mail readers can support the secure base that the homes provide for vulnerable children by contributing to our 2016 Christmas Cheer Fund. Please turn to page 6 for details.
Grocott’s Mail was present and reported on events at Rhodes University on the night of Monday 17 October, and the aftermath the next day.
Please go online for our account and photographs that include some of the damage to the campus; a teacher's shock to find a brick and broken glass on the floor of his offiice; one protester’s conflict between her loyalty to the #FeesMustFall cause and her fears for her safety and her future; and the fear and anxiety of security guards caught in the crossfire. bit.ly/GrocFees12
That night, on which police responded with force to the protesters’ decision to disrupt a test and attack infrastructure, our reporter was warned by police against driving on to the campus on the basis that three vehicles had already been overturned. However, there was no attempt to prevent reporters from entering the campus on foot on that night.
We were not barred the next night from covering events because we weren’t there.
Our colleagues in the student media give their account of those events on Page 11.
And just for the record – Rhodes University students raised the funds to build the first home at Ikhaya Losizo in Joza in 2007.