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THE Winnie Mabaso Foundation has an orphanage on the outskirts of Johannesburg and also runs several projects on the informal settlement of Meriting.

 

“Over fifteen hundred people live on this camp, and the community is desperately poor,” Lisa told us. “Families live in corrugated iron shack dwellings. There is no electricity, and water is collected from standpipes that are dotted around the settlement. Sanitation is minimal and up to twenty people can share an outside chemical toilet.

 

“Life is tough and unemployment is rife, but the people in the community are incredibly resilient with smiles that light up the darkest of days.”

The Foundation has been running a feeding scheme for the community for several years, and whilst one cannot underestimate the importance of this, Lisa wanted to find a more sustainable solution to providing food.

“The community is enormously poor, but one thing they do have is the most wonderful, fertile soil. It suddenly struck me one day that if we could enable the community to grow their own produce, they wouldn’t have to rely on us feeding them.

“A bit like that wellknown Chinese proverb – give a man a fish and you feed him for day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”