Monday afternoon and a phone call from Germany. A company will be in Cape Town with 150 employees in the near future and wants to dedicate part of their time for social work. The request is whether HOPE Cape Town cannot provide for that kind of work, which should be adequate to the portfolio of the employees, last for a couple of hours and leave the people afterwards joyful about the work they have done.
It is amazing to see the amount of people wishing to do something good and meaningful – and how difficult it is indeed to satisfy this need. It should have a long term effect and make everybody instantly happy, the people providing the service, the people receiving the service and I guess also us, as the bridge between both.
I salute those who are willing to sacrifice time and money for a good cause; on the other hand I do acknowledge and know out of experience how difficult it is to provide such opportunities. Opportunities which can be so crucial to the understanding of the situation, we are facing here in South Africa but also in many other locations around the world.
We from HOPE Cape Town try our very best to accommodate all those wishes for helping a good cause for a limited time. And if we cannot help, we feel that we missed out an opportunity to help somebody understanding, feeling, tasting, experiencing a situation which is so normal for the majority of people living on this earth. An experience which makes a European or North American aware that life conditions in their respective areas are the exemption and not the rule.
And having people assisting people can also have a funny side, as we experienced getting some help from as far as I can remember the Canadian nay. Committed to help to create a vegetable garden they all arrived full of enthusiasm in the township. But none of the inhabitants showed up; it was even more silent on the street than usual. We only found out later that the uniforms of the navy and the SAPS are similar – so people, seeing so many “policemen” thought it would be best to stay away – one never knows…. 🙂 The misunderstanding was sorted out and a great vegetable garden is now in place..
Filed under: General, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, Reflection, Uncategorized, cape town, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, social work, vegetable garden, voluntary, voluntary work
