Blog

Marianne Thamm blogged recently about Rwanda, where all adults are obliged to do five hours of community service one day a month.

Shops and businesses close, and for the morning the population does anything from picking up litter to maintaining public buildings and gardens. The coming together of the people to rebuild the country is being described as a post-genocidal miracle. Read the whole blog at tinyurl.com/63bq5jb.

Although we don’t have an official requirement for community service, it’s something South Africa desperately needs. Thamm hopes NGOs will come together to co-ordinate voluntary service for people who would like to contribute in this way. In the meantime, there’s nothing stopping anyone from volunteering a few hours of community service a month.

As Thamm says: “Offering your time or services in order to help others is a rewarding and deeply fulfilling activity. It provides a sense of agency and connectedness, offers an occasion for skills transfer and empowerment as well as the added immediate obvious and visible benefits. If we wish to defeat the forces of division and negativity that are currently being given expression, then it might be time to get up and be seen to be doing something about it.”

If you’re feeling depressed by the dismal results in the nationwide literacy assessments of primary school pupils, and you’d like to help underachieving children learn to read, three organisations in the Western Cape would love your help. A small contribution of time could make an enormous difference to a child’s life.

Help2read trains volunteers then places them in primary schools in their community, where they work one on one with children who are struggling with English reading. All it takes is a one- to two-hour commitment a week, during term time. Find more info at https://help2read.org

Shine Centre is always looking for volunteers who can give an hour-and-a-half weekly to work with individual children in schools. Its latest assessments have shown that in just six months, 105 of the 110 children it works with who were graded “at risk” for literacy are off the danger list. Find it at http://www.theshinecentre.org.z.

Finally, if you don’t have time but you have books to donate to schools without libraries, the Bookery would love them. And if you’d like to give a few hours of time occasionally, people are always needed to cover books. Go tohttp://www.equaleducation.org.za/bookery – Cape Times