In many ways
up with home visits to tackle social ills that impact on the residents’ lives: hunger, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, child vulnerability because of absent parents, difficulties in child-headed households and learning problems at school, to name a few.
“What started off as an animal service has evolved into a holistic social service with dog home visits providing a portal into the community it serves,” said the founder and manager, Adrienne Olivier.
When a team from Funda Nenja visited the gogo’s home on a hillside overlooking Durban’s main reservoir, she spoke of how she and her household of 11 people often went hungry.
“If our neighbours don’t give us something to eat, or money to buy food, we often go hungry,” she said, adding that contemporaries among her friends and family she grew up with on a farm near Nottingham Road all received pensions. She did not because of a bungle over her date of birth. “My identity book says I was born in 1962,” she said. “But I was born in 1958.”
She told Funda Nenja social worker Thandeka Ngubane that the owner of the farm had organised the identity document for her, but her birth date must have been incorrect.
Ngubane said the next challenge would be to speak to Gasa’s friends and family who she grew up with and ask them to make statements she could present to the Department of Home Affairs.
But Funda Nenja’s outreach work was not only about applying for hand-outs. Student social worker Rene Morcom made a deal with Gasa that her family worked towards developing themselves by preparing ground to extend their vegetable garden and she would organise spinach, pumpkin and beans seeds as well as seed potatoes.
“Then we will have created some sort of change and the family can be slightly sustainable,” she said.
Morcom added that with the process would be education “to make this vegetable garden flourish”.
She also picked up that a baby in the household needed stimulation and provided toys and advice for the mother.
A third social worker, Nomonde Dlungwane, had the dogs’ interests at heart. She had come to check whether the family had followed her advice about building a kennel for Lion.
They had done so, but another dog, Duke, that was dominant, had evicted Lion but they had provided two dog shelters for the two dogs.
Funda Nenja also provided food for the family and dog food for Lion and Duke.
“I thank God for my dogs,” said delighted gogo Gasa.
For further information, www.facebook.com/fundanenja/ visit