Carol’s Column

Rain and cold compound the misery

Cape Town was bitterly cold on Thursday. At midnight Khayelitsha was closed off and ringed by security forces to stop taxis and buses driving through the sprawling township. Measures to stop the on-going taxi violence.

At 5am, it was even colder as thousands of people walked through the icy wind to pick-up points where buses or taxis should have been waiting to take them to work. The buses (protected by armed men) were there, but most of the taxis from other areas had stayed away a gesture of solidarity for their Khayelitsha colleagues.

Khayelitsha is an enormous and never-ending township but Community Safety Minister Hennie Bester said the organisers had calculated that no person dwelling there would have to walk more than two and a half kilometres to reach a pick-up point.

Perhaps it was only two and a half kilometres, but it must have been a long walk in the rain, wind and chilling cold. Especially for the thousands of elderly residents who work to put food on the table.

Many chose to go by train and at 5, 6 and 7am, they were crushed on station platforms and then unable to get on the stiflingly packed trains.

At 5, 6 and 7am it was dark. During Cape Town's winters, daylight is reluctant to appear.

Two and a half kilometres was also an arduous walk for children, many at primary schools, many who had not eaten. So hundreds stayed away from school yet another disruption in their already fragile lives.

Then that evening, they all had the same struggle to get to their homes, many just shacks leaking in the heavy rains.

The siege of Khayelitsha was a desperate attempt by concerned authorities and communities to stop the taxi violence and the horror of bus drivers and passengers being murdered on their way to work.

On Friday, August 4, there was a trek of a different kind. This one from Gauteng when hundreds of large-hearted people flew down to Cape Town to wash, feed and rehabilitate the penguins rescued from oil-polluted Robben and Dassen islands.

There is no question that these penguins need to be saved, to be fed and to be nurtured. For if we don't conserve our precious wildlife, we shall be poorer.

Then there is the shocking advertisement by the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society with a picture of a child pouring oil over himself with the slogan reading "NOW WILL YOU HELP ME?"

I use the word shocking advisedly because the ad is meant to shock us all into an awareness that there are thousands of children in desperate circumstances: orphans, abandoned and abused children.

Children who are not loved, nurtured or cherished.

There are those, conservation authorities and members of the public, who are angry. A spokesperson for the SA National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, said: "We find it reprehensible to show a child pouring oil over himself in a parody of an oiled penguin in an attempt to raise funds."

No. What is reprehensible is that Child Welfare is in such a desperate situation without sufficient funding to offer succour to those children who need it.

That there are children starving in this country, children without shelter, without care - this is reprehensible and a tragedy. That Child Welfare has to use such desperate measures to raise funds is reprehensible.

Tragic and reprehensible too is the evil violence that calls for the desperate measures of barricading Khayelitsha. The out-of-control violence that creates hardship and even death for ordinary people.

But there is a glimmer. It is positive that there are so many people willing to do good things, and that is a strength of which we can all be proud.

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