Bobs for Good Foundation fighting extreme poverty in the City of Gold
Robyn McCormick, a 22-year-old charity employee originally from Burntisland in Fife, surveys the township of Egoli in the southern suburbs of Cape Town for the first time and declares: "Poverty in Scotland is nothing like poverty in South Africa."
Cape Town.
- By Geraldine McKelvie
- Published in the Courier : 13.07.11
- Published online : 16.07.11 @ 12.50pm
Robyn has lived in South Africa since the age of three and has grown up with the "extreme disparity in wealth" that she admits the country is "infamous" for.
Ironically, Egoli is Afrikaans for City of Gold and to get to the settlement from the city centre you have to pass some of the nation's most affluent properties.
But for the scores of children who live in its makeshift one-bedroom shacks — often with their large, extended families — the Saturday afternoon arrival of a handful of volunteers is the highlight of their week. They are already waiting in the communal field when the van arrives and scream with excitement as they fight to hug those who have come to help them.
Some are orphans and others may already be HIV positive. Very few, if any, even have clean clothes. Poverty is inescapable in Egoli yet, until now, most non-governmental organisations seem to have been unaware of its existence.
To the outside world, South Africa may have come a long way since the dark days of apartheid — but many believe the government could be doing much, much more in desperate townships like these, many of which were originally established as a means of racial segregation and white control.
Robyn and her colleagues at the Bobs for Good Foundation — founded in 2009 by former national rugby captain Bob Skinstad with the unique aim of providing every child in the country with a pair of school shoes — have been summoned to the area by a group called On Eagles Wings, from the local church of St John the Evangelist.
Every week, they provide the children with a meal and a few hours of songs and games. But almost every child is barefoot and the effects of this are instantly obvious — just one example is a boy who looks no older than five and has a huge, gaping wound on his right foot which has become infected. The older children say he fell on to a piece of glass left in the field.
The group's founder, Glenda Maree, contacted Bobs for Good to make its staff aware of the situation. She says that if she and her friends could afford to, they would come here every day to feed the children. "We just have to hope and trust in God that they are being fed throughout the week," she adds. She later tells the foundation that its support means more than it "could ever imagine".
But this is not an unfamiliar scenario for Robyn, a journalism graduate who manages the organisation's ever-growing social networking responsibility. On the regular "shoe drops" the charity carries out — wherein the shoes are taken to primary schools and fitted to individual children, frequently by those who have helped raise the money to buy them — grown men are often reduced to tears by the gratitude of the pupils.
'Crying through it'
"One my first-ever shoe drop there was one Scottish man — a really big, strong, rugby player — whose hands were bigger than most of the tiny shoes he was fitting," Robyn says. "When I spoke to him at the end of the day, he said the shoe drop was so emotional for him that he was crying through it.
"I really do believe that a pair of shoes can give a child hope, pride and dignity. I've seen it in their faces. They smile, they show off to each other, they clutch onto the new shoe box just to say that they have something new, something just for them.
"In Africa, shoes have a symbolic tie to pride and affluence. With this pride in their appearance, children are encouraged to take pride in their schoolwork too, whereas without shoes, children are often too embarrassed to attend school, may not be able to walk the distances to school barefoot, or they may not be allowed into school without the full uniform."
There are already significant barriers for children from poor backgrounds, particularly townships like Egoli. Most schools require at least some degree of parental contribution — and, in Robyn's words, universities and colleges remain "prohibitively expensive".
But for the staff at Bobs for Good, it is often frustrating and depressing to acknowledge the fact that some of the children who are filled with pride at receiving their first pair of school shoes may never have the opportunity to truly fulfil their academic potential.
Continued...
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