At FoodBank, we get to work with many people and organisations in our poorer rural communities who do credible work in challenging hunger, but occasionally we come across a person whose work is not only credible, but incredible as well. One such person is Magda Meyer, who runs Magda Sopkombuis (Magda Soup Kitchen) in Pedro Street on the outskirts of Paarl.
The foodbank operations centre in Magda's lounge
To call her organisation a Soup Kitchen is an understatement: On my visit to her humble but cozy home, I was absolutely amazed at how much community work is being done in 24 Pedro Street. The front garden and side alley has been turned into a makeshift community centre, complete with a set of restrooms, benches and tables, and a small garden of petunias. Up to 400 people turn up twice a week to the centre not only to be fed, but to access a range of community services from nutrition counselling to HIV/AIDS advice, and to network with other people with similar problems and work on strategies together. The back porch is now a fully-equipped catering-grade kitchen, leading into the yard which is now mostly taken up with leafy vegetable garden, a project started three years ago to help make the operation more self-sufficient.
Walking into her home, I discover the lounge has become an operations centre: a set of books carefully records each person helped through Magda's organisation, where they live and a bit on their history. A chest of drawers contains an envelope for each month of the 12 years of operation, each envelope containing the counterfoil of each financial and food donation received, and records of how it was spent or distributed. Since my visit co-incided with a delivery of baby food from the FoodBank, I got to see the operation center "workers" (her entire family!) spring into action as they received the delivery, stored it in the pantry, filled in the paperwork for the "monthly envelope" files, and present us as FoodBank with a thank you card. The card says "A tikkie van waardering" ("a touch of gratitude"), and has a set of beautifully designed petunias on the cover (from her garden, no doubt!). And the IT geek in me could not help notice the "marketing department" wing of the house, where a stack of simple but effective flyers showed that WordArt still has a following somewhere!
Magda's initial struggle to feed her family ends up feeding a community
For all intensive purposes, what Magda has developed is an effective rural FoodBank operation with virtually no resources. This meant I had to sit down with Magda, and record the story of how her organisation came to be, and learn some of her lessons. Magda's story starts 12 years ago, when a recession similar to the current one caused her to lose her retail job. As with most job losses, Magda's initial reaction was to sink into depression and hopelessness, which, coupled with the stress of having to feed her family, took a toll on her health. However, during this period of darkness, she began to draw hope from her mother (still alive today, and a spritely 95 year old!) who brought her up together with 6 other siblings through many hardships, and put a plan into action to feed her family. Her plan involved putting pride aside, and knocking on doors in Paarl to offer her cleaning services in exchange for food, wood and clothes. The work involved long hours, and included tasks like bathing elderly residents, but she persevered. Not having any form of transport, she would have to hitch rides on the bakkies (pick-up trucks) of businessmen back to her home, making 3 to 4 changes along the way at times. At when she got home, she still had to cook, clean and feed her children.
Now many people in her situation, once they have secured a stable pipeline of work that brought enough to feed her family, would stop there and take a rest. Not Magda! She realised there were many people in her situation, also battling the depression of joblessness, and she felt a calling to use the little she had left over to help them as well. Her home was equipped with an old-fashioned but large wood stove, and together with a large copper pot she began using her unused food and wood to open a small soup kitchen for some of her neighbours.
How a chance encounter linked Magda to the FoodBank Network
Word soon got around of the wood-stove and the copper pot, and Magda found herself needing to feed more people. She used her resourcefulness and charm to actively campaign among many of the local business people and rally donations for her operation. A building business with left-over construction timber started a drop-off each week at her house, and she set some of her unemployed neighbours up in a daily operation to chop it into firewood for the kitchen. A trip to the nursery yielded a number of plants and seeds that could not be sold, and both a flower (those lovely petunias again!) and vegetable garden started up. Her son, who after finishing high-school and completing some studies at the local technical college, began repairing cars for a living in a makeshift garage in the front of the property. And perhaps, the quirkiest but most inventive part of the operation: a nook where unused car parts are turned into interesting garden ornaments: I noticed how an upturned mudguard makes a really good bird bath with the right touch of paint.
How Magda's operation became part of the beneficiary network of the FoodBank is almost as quirky: One of the elderly people required a new set of glasses, and was refused one by the public health clinic due to lack of funds. Magda took a trip to Paarl, and stopped at a couple of random houses, one of them being the then services chairperson of the Paarl Lions Club, Mike O'Neill. He put her in touch with a local optometrist who offered to help, and supplied the spectacles at no cost. Laurel Cadle of the Drakenstein Development Forum (DDF) assisted her organisation in getting properly registered as a public benefit organisation. This allowed her to tap into their donor networks, including FoodBank Cape Town, Lions Club and the DDF Community Gardens. Her project, together with other projects and organisations in the region, will hopefully soon form one of next FoodBank operations in the Cape Winelands district.
Reflecting on the afternoon spent with her, I realised that our country is filled with incredible people who are what I term "Philanthropists eKasi" (eKasi being local slang for "from the township"). We often think of philanthropy as something only wealthy people do, but we fail to recognise how much is being done by people with limited means but almost limitless hope and energy. Augustine, one of Africa's first great thinkers, commented that our purpose in life is to obtain everything that we can, take from it what we need, and leave the remainder for those that need it more. It is a simple philosophy at the heart of what a FoodBank tries to achieve, securing quality unused food for the hungry. It is also what drives people like Magda and other philanthropists eKasi to achieve the incredible things they do.
