A Big Thank You to all the people who has been so help full in the garden in 2006

This year we started with a garden overgrown with weeds, due to the heavy rains this past summer. The grasses were standing shoulder high till the gates.

Thankfully we received a lot of help with cleaning it up, to get it ready for planting our winter crop.

Firstly there was the KLM crew spending a full day pulling out the long grass.

RED HILL SCHOOL.

Then during the April holidays there was Jenny Page with her group of students from Red Hill school. They arrived with extra tools, seedlings to plant and lots of eager hands to take out the next load of long grasses..

AMERICAN SCHOOL

In May , Elizabeth Love offered to come and help with her son Lucas and a group of students from the American school to do their community service in our garden, twice a week they spent the afternoon after school in the garden.

They really cleaned the garden out, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH we could not have done it with out all your help.

Another big THANK YOU has to go to Maaike’s good friend in Holland ROSE BROSHUIS, she got all her friends and family to donate towards our garden.

We have been able to build new retainer walls, put in an irrigation, gutters on the roofs of the kitchen and the art room to catch the rain water and a pump to pump the water from the tanks to the garden. Lots and lots of compost for the second terrace.

Thank you all so much for your generosity.

In June we got more good news, another of our wonderful Dutch friends Hans Katoen and the KLM Document Center and Navigation Employees and the Bos and Vaart Primary school in Haarlem (Holland) donated R8706 which has enabled us to get 2 truck loads of topsoil and labour to dig our 3rd terrace which will give us another 25 new beds ready for planting of our summer crops in August.

To all of you a” Mighty Big Thank You”- without your help it would not be possible.

We also like to thank Michael Smith for growing and donating many of our seedlings and Ken Reid for donating fertilis, vegetable plants and earth worms and always being there for advise.

Thank you to our 2 new volunteers Shirley Doyle and Debbie Speller without whom it would not be possible for me Maaike to do all that is needed in the garden. Shirley and Debbie we really appreciate your commitment and reliability in assisting us in the garden.

Thank you all so much for your generosity !!!!!! From Maaike and the CLM team

One of our great sponsers

KLM crews keep on coming

Every now and again we get flight attendants from the KLM helping us to prepare, dish up and hand out the food. In March we had a big group of KLM people, which enabled Vanessa and Alex to gain more experience once again at facilitating such a large group of volunteers. It is also wonderful that the KLM crews are so faithful in their support of the project and we gladly welcome more of these enthusiastic, hard working visitors.

Thank you KLM staff & Wings of Support for your wonderful & generous support.

Official opening of our Kitchen

On Tuesday 28 February 2006, we celebrated the ‘official’ opening of our kitchen at the Riversands Primary School and therefore also the start of our feeding project. Although we already started feeding the children in November last year, we had not officially launched the project yet and waited for the feeding process to run smoothly and without hick ups. In February we felt confident enough to allow all our sponsors and friends to come and watch the feeding process in full swing and to our delight, many of them did. The continuous rain in February gave us quite a headache and we were worried that we might not be able to feed the children at the kitchen. It had already happened once in January that we had to bring all the food down to the classrooms and dish up in the classrooms, which is not ideal! But fortunately ‘Plan B’ was not necessary because the 28^th turned out to be a fine day with even a bit of sunshine to add to our festive mood.

Most of our guests arrived around 9 am and were welcomed with tea, coffee, biscuits, delicious milk tart (made by Milly!) and freshly baked scones with jam and cream. Maureen, who runs CLM’s children’s shelter in Diepsloot, woke up very early to bake the scones for us and THAT we could taste. Thanks Maureen, your scones were enjoyed by everyone! As usual, we fetched the Grade 1-5 pupils from their classrooms around 9h25 and they arrived at the kitchen in a surprisingly disciplined manner, many of them holding each other’s hands. Normally we have great difficulty to let them walk instead of run to the kitchen but apparently they wanted to show our visitors that they do know how to behave. Groups of them sang a few lovely songs while waiting in line to wash their hands and to receive a plate of food with a roll. We served rice with a stew of minced meat and lots of fresh vegetables and we could all see that it went down very well. During second break, when we fed the Grade 6 and 7 pupils, many of them even came back for a second serving. In between the two breaks, the school choir treated us on some beautiful songs, while clapping and dancing.

We started feeding!!

We ended the year by feeding the Riversands children one day a week for the month of November,2005

Some days we were able to feed 500 children, some days all the children. We saw that when we gave the children soup we were able to feed all 750 children and then when we served stew and rice 400 children. This was because we did not have enough pots or food.

In December, 05 Wings of Support from Holland kindly sponsored the purchase of three more 60L stainless steel pots and a lovely 30L electric urn which should really help us to have enough vessels now to be able to cook for all 750 kids. So a mighty big Thank You to Wings of Support for their generosity.

The Children of Riversands Primary

In June 2003 Milly Jarvis, together with a couple of Dutch ladies, started to make a vegetable garden at the Riversands Primary school after she saw that a lot of children attending this school are from the informal settlements of Zevenfontein and Diepsloot and are suffering.

There are approximately 700 disadvantaged children and 40 preschoolers attending this school, often having very little or nothing to eat for breakfast.

Three times a week they receive 2 slices of bread with jam at school via the government feeding scheme and for many of them that is the only food they have that day.

The project’s main objective is to supply these children with a cooked, nutritious and healthy meal every day so that they have the energy to listen and learn at school.

The latest brain research reveals that nutrition has a tremendous impact on the functioning of the brain and on children’s behaviour. The vegetables from the garden will be used for the meals and the rest of the ingredients will be bought and sponsored by suppliers.

The second objective is to teach a group of unemployed mothers how to cook healthy meals by giving them the opportunity to cook in the kitchen and at the same time to teach them how to make a vegetable garden, so they can make their own at home.

The third objective is to teach the children how to maintain and tend the vegetable garden, and to teach them that nothing in life is for free by requiring them to do odd jobs in and around the garden.

CLM would like to instill a good working ethos in these children.

How it all began!

A few years ago I met Milly Jarvis and Marianne Belt, they told me about a project they were starting at the Riversands Primary school in Diepsloot( a settlement NW of Johannesburg South Africa).
They wanted to start a feeding kitchen to give the 750 children at the school one hot meal every day.
There was an old farm building at the school that we could use, late 2005 they had renovated the building with the help of Lee-Ann Manas and many sponsers.

At the same time we started a vegetable garden to grow the veggies for the meals, we met with many many problems the first 2 years , the biggest one being the rain washing the soil away
during the raining season in South Africa.
The piece of land next to the kitchen, where we are growing the vegetables is lying on sloping ground and each year the rain would wash the ground away during the summer rains and during the dry winters we would carry buckets of water up and down the hill to water all the vegetable beds.

We had no sponsers yet and were just struggling on, but it felt as if we had to start each year all over again.

Till August 2005 when I took a friend of mine, Rose Brockhus to see the project, she had a plan, for her 50th birthday she asked her friends and family to sponsor the vegetable garden and wow they did!!!
With the start of 2006 we had enough money to built 3 walls for the first 3 terraces and to put a bottle irrigation in+ lots of compost and new seeds.