In Peddie in the Eastern Cape, children are eating wild plants to survive, as the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown take their toll.
Gift of the Givers project manager Ali Sablay told Groundup that when the organisation’s food truck arrived in Wesley, Peddie, last week, people started dancing and singing. Until then, only 25 food parcels had been handed out in the area since the beginning of the lockdown, Sablay said. He said some people in Peddie were eating wild plants to deal with their gnawing hunger pangs.
“It is the worst amount of hunger in the 28 years of the Gift of the Givers,” said Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, who founded the organisation in 1992 in South Africa. “In our 28-year history, we have never had the call centre so busy. Previously the switchboard operator answered the call centre, but the organisation brought in an extra four people to man the call centre. My staff could not cope—at any one time there were 8,000 emails in my inbox. We had to put in four extra staff to clear the emails. The public floods us with calls asking for help,” he said.
One in eight reported frequent hunger, for three or more days in the past seven days, in their household, and one in 14 reported perpetual hunger, almost every day or every day.“It would seem that in times of acute crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, many households have managed to protect or ‘shield’ the children in the household from that hunger.
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