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Gift of the Givers has stepped in to provide meals and support to residents of an Eastern Cape village where a mother recently killed her children and herself “because of poverty.”
The tragedy occurred in Tholeni Village near Butterworth.
Gift of the Givers, which marked 31 years of service on 6 August, said over the past two days they found child-headed households with no food, and an old woman cooking her last grain of food.
The organisation’s Eastern Cape coordinator, Corinne Conradie, said they found hunger rife everywhere, desperation, despair, unemployment, lack of opportunities and many undocumented children.”
“By all accounts the feedback from those in the know in the SAPS, Department of Social Development, community leaders and communities, the causative factor is hunger, and tragically, they say, this is not an isolated incident,” she said reflecting on the family tragedy.
Conradie said the Gift of the Givers team brought “abundant supplies of food to initiate soup kitchens for instant satiety of desperately hungry men, women and children.”
She said they would return to Tholeni Village on Tuesday with government officials to ensure that the children are registered for social support.
Conradie said community food gardens would provide sustainability for the villagers, but she said a lack of water was the limiting factor.
“Gift of the Givers will support the various villages as best we can, another self-inflicted death through hunger is an indictment on our nation as a whole,” she added.
