How important is offline activism? i spend a lot of time on Social Media dealing with issues of race and poverty and injustice. The hope is to share and engage and challenge and invite people to explore different areas where their lives could be better. Most of this relates to areas where i am trying to listen and learn and engage and wrestle at the same time. i might know or have discovered some [...]
Don't let it stop at the end of the fishing lesson though! From the BottomUp In two weeks time, about 15 learners from schools in the Greater Grassy Park area, are going to be presenting 7 to 10 minute speeches at the second ever Speak Up Festival. My favourite non-profit organisation, BottomUp, has been working with a number of students from Zeekoevlei, Fairmount and Lotus High to help get them ready for the event [...]
As the army was deployed into certain areas of the Cape Flats and beyond many of us watched with dismay... This is the narrative the rest of the country is given of an area facing tremendous odds. Communities still trying to crawl themselves out of the mess that apartheid and forced removals and lack of local government focus left them in. What good ever comes out of the Cape Flats? is a question that [...]
In about an hour or so i am going to head off to a local school to read a Maths exam to a pupil with a learning disability or challenge. While for me it is largely about having some kind of way of bringing in some money in, during a time when i have been mostly unemployed [since about November when i stopped the official freelance writing i was doing for that awful 'Christian' online [...]
When i say "Cape Flats", you say "Violence!" "Cape Flats!" "VIOLENCE!!" "Cape Flats!" "VIOLENCE!!" Because, along with Nazareth and townships and maybe even Africa as a whole, that is the kind of mindset that too many of us hold, right? The mindset that says [or suggests, or at the very least thinks]: What good ever came out of the Cape Flats...? Time to flip this narrative This past weekend i had the privilege - and [...]
A man was sitting opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his friends to him, the man said, "This poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their [...]
