In my 50th year, a year of great abundance (I celebrated my birthday with my beloved and dear friends in Istanbul, I was given a wetsuit and I started doing yoga regularly, to mention just a few highlights), the best thing that has happened to me is a morning shift once a week at a local school, making porridge and washing dishes.
Sounds a bit mad doesn’t it? But it is true … mostly … except when I am actually in the water in that wetsuit.
I help make porridge (fortified pap) and wash dishes at a Breakfast Club that feeds 450 children every morning before school. Most of the children come from disadvantaged homes, the vast majority have nothing to eat before they leave their homes in far-flung places to start journeys to school of 1-2 hours. In fact, a significant number of them do not even have anything to drink before they are squashed into buses and informal taxis, often with strangers.
On a recent morning one of the volunteers saw 12 children get out of an ordinary sized car, the three smallest climbing out of the boot.
It is impossible to imagine the stress of these journeys. Terrifying also to think of the pressure these children feel to be cheerful and switch their brains on when they get to the school, where they are lucky to have a place, which suggests there is some hope they will escape the poverty trap.
Two fantastic women, Aletta and Patsy, have made it their mission to make sure these children get a bowl of porridge, a cup of water and a piece of fruit before they go to the classroom.
So this is where I find myself once a week in the cool and misty morning, washing dishes, surrounded by hope.
Someone in my partner’s office heard she was volunteering at this Breakfast Club and donated 44 hand-knitted teddy bears to the Grade Rs. She (Lindsey) is member of a knitting group, a kindly, charitable version of a “stitch-and-bitch”, where a bunch of ladies get together for tea, possibly gossip, probably wine, and knitting. Many children in need, from burn victims at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital to our own little honey-bunnies at Breakfast Club, have their own unique little teddy bear from these lovely ladies.
Sometimes it is is easy to forget, but just look around … we are always surrounded by love and there are so many ways to help others.
Desperately seeking Wonderbags
The porridge is cold by the time the children eat it. Although I have never heard any complaints I know warmth would really supercharge the experience. So we are looking for 14 Wonderbags so that it is not ice cold when it is served.
The Wonderbag is a wondrous thing, an insulated bag into which one puts pots of food (cooked or cooking) to keep in the heat. It really can extend the cooking process long after you have stopped applying heat; we should all use them in our energy-poor world.
Rice and porridge are both perfect candidates. Add required amount of rice or porridge and water, bring to boil, transfer closed pot to Wonderbag and walk away. It will cook perfectly, no chance of it catching/burning and will stay hot for hours. A Wonderbag costs less than R300.
I am guessing there are many Wonderbags lying around the homes of suburbanites who seldom use them. If you have one to donate please mail capocassidy@gmail.com to arrange delivery/collection. If you would like to buy one for the cause please do. It will be much appreciated and will go to a fantastic cause.
BACK STORY
Aletta Ashmore, who worked as a remedial teacher at the school, and Patsy Bagraim, a Shine volunteer there, set up a pilot scheme to feed 75 Grade 1’s. The club today feeds a healthy E’pap, milk and fruit breakfast to over 400 Grade R – Grade 7 children each school morning.
These two wonder-women pay costs themselves where they can’t raise funds, as well as providing much of the labour. They get a little help from volunteers and locals to whom they pay a stipend. They are helped along by the kindness of family members, friends and a few strangers.
They get very little help from the authorities, national or local. In a maddening irony the school does not qualify for funding because it is located in a prosperous neighbourhood, even though 80% of the children are brought in from surrounding areas, most of them far away and very poor.
They know from having surveyed the children that 34.7% of them get up before 5am, another 52.4% rise between 5 and 6am. More than half the children spend the next hour to hour and a half commuting to school. Almost a quarter of them do not have anything to drink before leaving home, 14.1% do not eat before leaving home with another 45.2% saying they sometimes get something to eat before leaving home (in other words nearly 60% of the children are not sure of getting something to eat before they leave home for a trip of more than an hour before they start school). What sort if chance do they have of kicking into learning mode at 8am?
Support from businesses has also made all the difference. Addis supplied plates and serving bowls; Faircape donates ALL the milk (reason to support them!); Specsavers in Canal Walk tested all the volunteers’ eyes for free and covered the cost of lenses for those who needed glasses.
Make a donation or lend a hand …
When it comes to quick fixes, William Kentridge’s multi-panel digital video More Sweetly, Play The Dance is the hit of hits. It will bring me back as long as it is here (the plaque says it is on loan from the artist and the Goodman Gallery). Like a hit of something forbidden, the thrill of watching this particular tragi-comedy of pure South African-ness thrills almost as soon as it is delivered: half pleasure, half pain; half pride, half shame.
We were alerted to the wine pairing in the café at the top of the gallery by a little, almost matter of fact mention in the members’ newsletter. An amazing deal, R250 for a three-course meal, each course paired with a glass of wine. All of this in that delicious space with its glorious geodesic windows that protrude from the building in a visual representation of the former grain silos full-to-busting with grain.
Consider this extravaganza of a starter: scorched seabass, truffle crumbles, lemon-infused crème fraiche, pickled ginger puree, beetroot and baby leaves. And so it continued, a delicious journey through flavours and sensations. I have to be honest, though, the extra special ingredient on the day was our server, Richard.
No one was more surprised than me when the delicious main course played second fiddle to the vino, the Shiraz Mourvèdre Viognier 2015, even though the sous vide sirloin with caramelised pear croquettes (a revelation), the sweetest red pepper puree and the finest of green beans was a total knockout.
That surely must be the climax, I thought, but then the dessert, aah the dessert: strawberry and cream vanilla cake, wild strawberry moose, honey and vanilla parfait, black basil crumbs and strawberry compote.
In this mad and fast-moving world appetites change constantly, attention spans narrow and it is easy to dismiss things as old or tired. That said, this fabulous pairing of a sensational Maria and a reliable and gorgeous Tony in a grand-scale production of West Side Story is anything but.
Lynelle Kenned as Maria is out of this world. Hers is an absolutely sensational voice that seems to soar ever higher and higher. Even when the whole cast of 40 is singing their hearts out her crystal clear soprano is unmistakable. US-born actor Kevin Hack as Tony, in a role he has performed almost 400 times, provides a powerful balance to her brilliance.
High octone dance-fighting scenes between two warring street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, add a helping of excitement and brash big bang thrill.
I am just back from my first visit to Nude Foods, the grocery store we have all been waiting for! I do mean all of us. Cape Town’s new plastic-free grocer is heaven for hipsters, for sure, with its hemp seeds, healthy hair products and earth-friendly body and home products, and a veritable lezzer nirvana with all those non-GMO pulses and legumes and natural fibre face clothes.
But even if you are a totally unreformed meat-eating, booze-guzzling, SUV-driving capitalist you will probably like the raw understated style of the green-green grocer with its exposed brickwork and sexy container-ing of extra virgin olive oil, balsamic and friends.
After being offered a glass straw at the Alexander Bar last week I was delighted to see bamboo straws at Nude.
What a treat to see Zanele Muholi profiled in the Weekend FT. It brought to mind my first encounter with the riveting work of this activist-photographer …
The first part, Somnyama Ngonyama (an isiZulu phrase which translates to Hail, the dark lioness), is a collection of self-portraits taken as Muholi travelled the world. They shout defiantly, “I am me!” And even, “I am beautiful aren’t I!”
How I wished I didn’t have to read the surtitles in Moedertaal. Whenever I listened to the Afrikaans words spoken by Sandra Prinsloo I understood snatches of a beautiful, lyrical Afrikaans that cannot be translated. When I heard the Afrikaans and saw the translations in English I wanted to shout out: “That is not what she said; it is definitely not what he meant!”
Their story is three-quarters familiar, populated and coloured in by many versions and vignettes of our white South African stereotypes. The rest of it we watch from a distance, sometimes amused, often horrified. This quarter is the deeply personal, unique happiness and pain that can never be shared, the private journey between two people in love, touched occasionally by a third: a parent, another lover or, most importantly, a child.
Even in Milan, in London, in New York and other art-obsessed places it would have been difficult this week to totally escape the hype around the opening of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa), the world’s largest museum of contemporary African art, in Cape Town.
How we ‘Oohed’ when we were told that tickets to the opening VIP reception cost R70k a piece. How we ‘Aahed’ when we heard the party was being hosted by Gucci, as if the Italian fashion label was a better choice than, say, MaXhosa, Stoned Cherrie or David Tlale (but of course we are still trying to turn our gaze away from those crumbling old edifices in the north).
William Kentridge is a white guy, too, but wow he gives so many of us a lot of pleasure and makes us pause as we wonder at how we feel so constricted by our past and free of it at the same time.
The Gucci party was probably pretty fab but, as Italians superstar moments go, I think it was eclipsed by a golden moment in Milan this week when the original supermodels Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen joined Donatella Versace on the catwalk to mark the passing 20 years ago of Gianni.
That misses the point totally. The opening weekend was packed with all the usual suspects, plus a lot of people who don’t normally ‘do art’. They posed and people-watched and took selfies in front of Nicholas Hlobo’s haunting dragon in the cavernous atrium while their children did cartwheels on the roof, providing a totally different show and a snapshot of us.
Gangsters and their molls, bootleggers, poets and playwrights, flappers and assorted dandies … just another night at your favourite tavern in town, you might think, but Cape Town’s monthly swing nights, which are launching on 1 September at the Reserve at the Taj, promise a whole lot more.
These Prohibition era nights (sans Prohibition of course) will bring a little Speakeasy-style decadence to Cape Town’s kinda sleepy city centre.