Hout Bay community unites to tackle hunger

Two shrivelled onions and a wilted cabbage leaf were the only food in the fridge at house Z195, off an alley in Imizamo Yethu, in Hout Bay, Cape Town, over the weekend.

“We have been eating pap,” said 16-year-old Thembakazi, who lives there with her grandmother Novusile Matshata and three other children.

Her family, like others in the high-density settlement, live on an old-age and child grants — and it is hard for them to find food they can afford during lockdown.

But the Courage initiative — organising food parcels for some 60,000 people in Hout Bay — has been bringing relief to families like theirs during since the beginning of April.

Through the efforts of Courage, founded by local businessman David Froman, dozens of partners including local NGOs, community groups, churches and sports clubs are working together to stave off hunger during lockdown.

Courage is raising funds to buy the food — about a fifth of the R30m target has been donated so far — and its team is co-ordinating donations and deliveries.

Their community partners, for example the Hout Bay United Football Club, are helping with the collection of food, which is then sanitised before delivery.

Partners are working from a central list to make sure that the deliveries reach as many people in need of food aid as possible.

Roughly 700 food parcels, each intended to feed a family of four for two weeks, came into their central warehouse on Monday, said Lisa Leathes from Courage.

The food parcels are handed out at the local school. Many Imizamo Yethu residents rely on the parcels, such as grandmother Joyce Xipu, who said they would go hungry without them.

Her 13-year-old grandson, fixing his skateboard on the pavement next to her, is so thin that he is wearing clothes for a much younger child.

“We are all suffering because of lockdown,” said another resident, Mantombi Nguzuli, who has a job as a domestic worker.

Everyone echoes what she says: no money, not enough food.

Last week, 30 tonnes of vegetables and half a million apples were distributed to more than 5,000 families, said Gordon Aeschliman, co-founder of community farming project Gracie Love in a Bowl, which is working with another organisation, Food Flow, to get fresh produce to families.

“Food Flow is continuing to focus our work on communities that are still falling through the cracks — both in terms of the more than 200 small farmers we are supporting and the communities receiving the veg,” said co-founder Ashley Newell.

The 20 or more communities who benefit from their sponsored “harvest bags” go beyond Hout Bay to communities living on the Cape Flats and even the Winelands.

Monday marked a month since Food Flow was launched. “In that time, we have raised more than R1m from more than 4,000 individual donors,” said Newell.

“Currently we work primarily in the Western Cape, but we have expanded to the Eastern Cape [and] KwaZulu-Natal, and potentially will add provinces in the weeks to come.”