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.”
“An education can mean so much to children here,” Robyn says. “It’s something Bobs for Good is trying to encourage because we know how many doors it can open and how many lives it change.
“There was so much potential in the children we visited in Egoli. They were all incredibly intelligent, perfectly bilingual and very fast learners of games, songs and names.
“I spoke to a boy called Brandon. He was 15, and he looked really big and intimidating, but he turned out to be very soft-spoken, impeccably mannered and very, very smart.
“When I told him I had studied television journalism, he said, ‘I want to be on the other side of the camera, as an actor.’ I was blown away at the creative way in which he thought.
“I get so worried that there will be wasted potential as, so often, no matter how hard these children work, and how well they do, their parents simply cannot afford tertiary education.
“All I can hope is that people like those who are helping out at Egoli will keep doing so, and encourage others to get involved.”
By the next week, the charity has already begun investigations into sourcing shoes for local primary schools. The visit was meant to be a one-off, but the staff are compelled to return this time with a doctor, who does her best to provide basic medical treatment to as many children as possible.
Robyn has also already begun posting pictures of the children on Facebook and Twitter. “If I can get one person to sit up and really learn something from the pictures, or to be moved by a child in a video, and that person makes a donation, I’m happy,” she admits.
“I really did wonder if I was just capturing other people doing good things, but over time the reaction and donations which have come through interaction online and articles in papers have really proved me wrong.
“But the most emotional experience for me was going back to the Egoli children for a second time, and they remembered my name, and what games we had played the week before. All the little girls came up to me, and they just clung on, giving me kisses and cuddles like they’d never had attention before. To leave them that day was very difficult.”
Image used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user Coda.
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…