Day 40: Proximity blindness

Kobus’ mom arranges an interesting charity for the local kids in Paternoster. This remote little village on the South African west coast still functions as an active fishing community. Over the summer school holidays the local kids are left pretty much to their own devices on the dusty streets and sandy outcrops of the bay. What serves as a lovely retreat for the B&B crowd in search of isolation and the quiet coastal tug of the southwester, is a stimulus desert for the young minds. With no parents or planned activities, drug use and teenage pregnancy is rife.

Sanna van der Merwe started the West Coast Kids charity which is set up to provide a framework for the kids during their summer holiday. The majority of the salaries and projects are funded by sales from her shop. Tonight we had a long conversation about the difficulties she had in engaging the local community in the program. Paternoster has a lot of successful tourist and travel based businesses. The bed & breakfasts, hotel, shops and various restaurants all earn a living by trading off the unfettered charm of the local fishing community. When it came to funding the kids program they all turned a blind eye. The tourists who come to Sanna's shop were the ones to buy vouchers and tokens to fund kids meals and christmas presents. It seems that charity does not begin at home, or perhaps familiarity is the source of this contempt.

Sanna's daughter tells me that when you give the little kids a small gift of a sweet or drink there will often be a fight. When one of the kids however comes in with a little bit of money to buy a sweet they will go to great lengths to share, demonstrating their largesse. I wonder if we shouldn't think of the local businesses as gifts, a setting and sense of belonging given by the less fortunate fishermen to the property entrepreneurs. And like the kids they now jealously guard this precious thing. How could one change the paradigm so that they understand that the essence of what they provide is an earned privilege. Crime free nights with streets free from beggars is an interest earned. It takes a community to make ends meet.