Food for thought..

Shops like this one in Marionhill are dotted around all the townships, and sell anything from apples and bread, to beer, sweets and crisps - if you have the money.

Another early start, but worth getting up as Char, one of the South Africans working for COPT, had made pancakes!
They serve them 'over here' smaller than in the UK, but with maple syrup and a sprinkle of cinnamon...delicious...I ate four......all this work is making me incredibly hungry... and my jeans very tight!

Food doesn't appear to be a problem over here, for some reason I thought it might be...there is plenty of it, the problem is that the poor don't have the money to buy it.
COPT, as a charity, doesn't give out money when people ask for it...and you get asked a lot....(if you stop at road junctions for example....instead they give out food. All cars have packets and packets of dried noodles or what we would call 'pot noodles'. Apparently these are classed as nutritious and they eat them dry with the flavouring sprinkled on them like crisps, apparently they are also very filling. The other option is to give out slices of brown bread.

Again, after eating 4 pancakes this morning, and not having to worry about where my next meal is coming from, does put these peoples lives, and mine into perspective.

On this blog I was also going to moan about how cold I am at night....our room is quite damp, and the bed linen feels very damp, bordering on wet in the morning. I sleep in my pyjamas, a t-shirt, sweatshirt and socks. My family will tell you how high I have the heating turned up at home (yes, even in the summer months, even though I turn it down before Chris gets home!), here there isn't any heating...I just have a very hot coffee before I get into bed, and one as soon as I get up....in fact, I try to spend as little time in bed as possible as it really is a cold damp place.....
I'm doing two weeks of this, then I get to go home, to comfort.

Am I spoilt...or just lucky?
Compared to most of the people  I am seeing here, I am extremely well blessed.

The rest of my day was spent with Nosipho, the young lady with rheumatoid arthritis. As promised, Simon and I returned to take her shopping as she needed some new clothes and toiletries.

We collected her from her care home, and drove her to a shopping mall, about 20 minutes away. The extremes between rich and poor were very obvious here...you have expensive shops in the mall, yet on the freeway just outside, you have beggars trying to sell you trinkets or even plastic coat-hangers for R1 (10pence).
It was an experience shopping with Nosipho, she was looking for a jacket, and did want to try them on, but being unable to move her arms independently, or even lift them above shoulder height with help was a challenge, we persevered, and a few hours later, we had not one jacket but two, and a pair of jeans, a pair of pumps and some toiletries. We had a tired Simon, a thirsty Nosipho and a bemused me...this was the first time I had ever been shopping and not bought me anything!!