The Herb Garden

One of the project ideas was to get the children involved in the vegetable garden. Unfortunately this is not very practical – school hours are precious and should be used to cover the school syllabus. A bus collects the children from their homes and drops them off just before school starts. Again at the end of the school day, the children leave by bus. So no time for gardening!

We thought perhaps the teachers might be able to use the garden in their lesson plans, and we hope to explore this idea during 2007.

Another idea evolved concerning indigenous plants. It seems almost 70% of the children have a Zulu background, and we discovered that one of the mothers, Thoko, (she helps in the kitchen and in the garden), is a sangoma. (A sangoma is a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination and counselling in traditional Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi) societies of Southern Africa -en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangoma).

At the beginning of 2007, Thoko brought back some plants from her home in Kwazulu Natal, and has planted these in a small area on the first terrace. We hope that with the assistance of the teachers as part of a lesson, she will instruct and educate the children about the medicinal use of these plants according to the Zulu culture.

Visit Martinair Technicians

On Monday the 22 nd of January we got a lot of help from 9 Technicians of Martinair.
Hans Katoen from KLM' s Wings of Support had organised a working trip to Johannesburg for the technicians, we were very lucky to have some help with the ceiling in the safe house of CLM in Diepsloot and with the feeding of all the children in Riversands Primary school and digging a few beds in the vegetable garden.
Thank you all so much.
I am every time again surprised about the kindness of people, even from so far away, to come and help and work hard in a place and for people they dont even know! and for free ofcourse.

2007 starts with great news!

At the start of this new year we heard that the money from ST.ABCD has arrived.
St.ABCD is a Dutch organisation who looks for sponsors for projects of Dutch people in third world countries. My friend Marleen Buscop in Holland had applied for the vegetable garden to be put on their list, we send in a letter about what we are doing here and yes we were accepted, the rest of the work was done in Holland by Marleen, thank you so much Marleen thanks to you we can start soon with building our next wall for terrace 4 and put the irrigation in there as well.

We would also like to thank all the ladies of the Soroptimistclub Leiden-Aurora for donating to our garden, thank you so much for your generosity.

Heel veel dank aan alle vrienden en familie van Marleen en myzelf die hebben bijgedragen aan het geweldige bedrag dat we van St. ABCD ontvingen aan het begin van dit nieuwe jaar.

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.