Linda’s dream faces a cash crisis
IT started with a hungry man at her front door. Jobless Mickey Linda invited him in to share some bread and soup in her small township home.
Five years later, Linda feeds about 150 people a day using little more than two giant pots and a R1 300 disability grant.
“He had come from the clinic at the end of the road,” said Linda of the man who collapsed on her doorstep.
“He was on antiretrovirals, but did not have enough money for something to eat. He said to me, ‘Mama, there is something chewing me inside. Please can I have something to eat?’ ”
More sick people followed. Word spread. Soon Linda had children to feed too — their mothers dropped them off in the morning.
“What could I do? Of course, I had to help. My community is dry . . . there is no work, and peo- ple are sick,” said the former domestic worker who has a chronic heart condition.
This week, a lunchtime queue snaked out of the shack adjoining her house that serves as a soup kitchen.
Her charity, Yiza Ekhaya (Come Home), gives needy children and ailing adults breakfast and lunch, offers creche facilities and sewing classes, and is a place of safety for vulnerable kids.
Linda, 59, shares her bed with three toddlers and accommodates four more on a couch and the floor.
“They sleep here for their protection. Rape these days is not outside but inside the house.
“So some of their mothers prefer that they sleep here with me,” said Linda, who has roped in a neighbourhood pensioner to lend a hand at meal times.
Linda’s rescue mission has not gone unnoticed.
A Cape Town entrepreneur, Catherine Morris of Green Home, helped Linda expand her small backyard garden, which now produces herbs and veggies.
“Over the last few years I and others have occasionally arranged for volunteers to go out and plant vegetables and donate plants,” said Morris. “The food goes to the soup kitchen.
“Working in a garden is a great activity with the kids who would normally be playing in the street.”
Linda has set up a choir and dance group, and hosts occasional cultural events.
Her daughter, Belinda, praised her mother’s efforts. “She always said she had a dream of feeding the needy,” said Belinda.
But a shortage of funding threatens to scupper Linda’s dream. A partner organisation recently pulled out, meaning Linda must once again rely on her disability grant and piecemeal donations to keep going.