Calculating the cost

The Monument and the museums were transformed this week into an array of colour and excited voices as hundreds of school children listened and learnt at the displays, lectures and workshops on offer.

If you live in Grahamstown you’re lucky: you hardly have to go beyond your doorstep to enjoy the continent’s biggest science festival.

Particularly pertinent at a time when the Department of Water and Sanitation has expressed concern at low dam levels in the Eastern Cape and is discussing contingency plans for water supply is Scifest’s Waterworld display, which is tucked away between Rhodes University’s new Life Sciences building and the Barratt lecture theatre complex.

Next Friday we will publish a water-scarcity guide, with tips on how to harvest, conserve and re-use water, as well as facts and figures about water and drought that are relevant to Grahamstown.

This week another kind of action was brought to our doorstep – actually Makana Municipality’s doorstep – when a supplier locked the chief financial officer inside the Budget and Treasury building, prompting a hostage situation response.

While it was reassuring to see that the police are capable of responding to such a situation you can’t help wonder at the waste of resources caused by such an alarm. This will hopefully not become the norm in our town.

We were honoured to be able to hand over the R16 000 our readers and local businesses gave to the Grocott’s Mail Christmas Cheer Fund this week.

The recipients were of course Child Welfare, who next Friday celebrate their centenary.

We’re proud to associate ourselves with an organisation that does valuable work for the children in our community.

As we celebrate Science and those who promote it, we also look at the stark facts about science education in our town and province.

Gadra Education’s Ashley Westaway in his column on Page 9 outlines the educational challenges in science teaching and learning in the Eastern Cape and makes a call for extraordinary measures to remedy it.

This week the cover price of Grocott’s Mail increases to R10, thanks to new increases in printing costs and fuel.

We’re grateful to you, our readers, for your continued support.

We hope to continue to build platforms for a conversation between the people in our town.

Currently we enjoy nearly 50 contributors, whose writing is scheduled variously over every month.

It’s a privilege to provide a space for some of our town’s best thinkers and most constructive doers to share their vision for a better place to be.