Working with Operation Hunger

When apartheid held its ugly grip on South Africa, the white government forced black and colored families to relocate outside of Cape Town, primarily to the barren Cape Flats area to the east. One entire neighborhood at the heart of Cape Town called District 6 has a museum dedicated to the forced relocations and evictions that were intended to completely separate the races and clear out the city for whites. Due to ongoing land disputes, 45 years after District 6 was declared a white area, it still lies mostly empty and weed-choked, and the razed homes have never been replaced. It’s one of many sad chapters in the book of South Africa, with later installments on topics such as poverty, hunger, and AIDs.

But people have to live somewhere, so townships sprang up in the Cape Flats, with names like Khayelitsha and Mitchellsplain. You can see the rainbow stages of poverty here--everything from wretched rows of shack upon shack made of rippled scraps of metal, to suburban-style homes of stucco over cement blocks, pretty western in appearance. Through Semester at Sea, we had signed up for a day visiting sites in this area that are served by a nonprofit called Operation Hunger. The trip promised an opportunity to roll up our sleeves and help people in danger of malnourishment (the polite word for starvation).

Our first stop was at an AIDs/HIV clinic in Khayelitsha called Site C, where we dropped off some food supplies to a soup kitchen that provides meals to people who have come for treatment. This visit would have felt a bit voyeuristic had we stayed longer without pitching in to cook or do something -- imagine having 40 people come and stare at you while you sat in chairs in a parking lot waiting for a meal -- but it was a really quick stop.

Then we were off to a squatters’ camp called, interestingly enough, Los Angeles. LA doesn’t even qualify as a township; it has no electricity, no police services, no streets, but at least a couple of public water spigots where wells have been drilled. Eventually it may become a township when the government finally admits it can‘t just displace the residents, most of whom came to the Cape Town area 15 years ago from rural areas in search of work or health care. For now, the people who live here have pirated live wires from the next township over the hill, and the only thing keeping their barefoot children from getting shocked is the fact that the current is pretty weak by the time it travels all that distance. Little electricity means little refrigeration, so not much in the way of fresh food; no streetlights, so not much in the way of safety; not much of anything. And yet the people appeared to have a sense of hope and a desire to make things work. After seeing the filth of northern India, we were impressed at the cleanliness and the minimal trash. Some of the shacks had fresh coats of paint. The kids walk to school on the other side of the freeway, about 2 miles away. It wasn’t perfect, but we definitely felt comfortable there, and very welcome.

Operation Hunger had just received a grant from the Spar grocery chain to fund a soup kitchen in Los Angeles to feed the children five meals a week, so they wanted to do an age/weight assessment of every child in the village. The soup kitchen is inside an old shipping container. Another container houses a church. Everyone in the settlement wanted to come see who we were. With our 40 people, 37 of them about age 21, we were able to set up three scales and make quick work of weighing about 100 children and plotting their weights by age on a progress chart. The Operation Hunger folks said they love Semester at Sea because they can do in one day what it normally takes them months to do. Some of the kids tried to help in the soup kitchen, but the ladies in charge didn’t want much help and quickly reclaimed their territory. But the kids who weren’t busy weighing or plotting or going door to door to round up all the children just played with the little guys, and everyone had a wonderful time.

At lunchtime, our group went offsite to a freeway convenience store to eat our boxed lunches from the ship. Many people bought lunch there so we could supplement the soup kitchen meal with all our sandwiches, fried chicken, hard boiled eggs and apples from the ship meals. It’s amazing how much food the ship provides in a boxed lunch. We returned in time to help serve the kids their soup, which is made with a protein powder for supplemental nutrition, and then the kids did some dancing for us and just played and took pictures with our cameras.

Operation Hunger had interesting information about malnourishment. For instance, boys are more likely to be under-weight because parents keep girls at home (when not in school) to protect them. Thus, the girls are in the kitchens a lot and can eat more. Boys go off all day and play soccer, so they eat less.

I’m so impressed with the attitudes of some of our students. This neighborhood could clearly use electricity, and two of the students who went on the trip are already planning fundraisers when they return to their campuses to raise the money needed to bring electricity to LA. All I could think of after we left was how much red tape would be involved and how it might be impossible to do it, but they don’t see those obstacles at all -- they just see an opportunity to try. Good lesson to me: Stop thinking about barriers!

A side note: We made this trip on our 32nd anniversary.