Ordinary community members do extraordinary things: It takes a community to care

A school sandwich project has found a way to inspire giving hearts and connect them to hungry mouths.

For the past few months, teachers and children from Crawford Preparatory Lonehill have worked together to provide a meal – comprising of a sandwich, juice and piece of fruit – once a week to between 75 and 80 young children who are cared for at the Daily Bread Crèche in the Msawawa informal settlement. The drive has been a community effort that turns lessons learned in the classroom into real-world actions.

Daily Bread Org is a Douglasdale-based charity started by Charmaine McGinley and provides several services to orphaned and vulnerable children, including psycho-social support, outreach and feeding schemes.

“Another teacher at the school had been doing a sandwich drive for Nelson Mandela Day for a few years, which I helped with before that teacher left the school,” explained Pravitha Naidoo, who teaches Grade 3 at the school and oversees the sandwich project. “And when I was teaching my class about processes, I decided to use food as an example of the processes things can go through.”

Naidoo supplied the bread, the children brought sandwich fillings and a lesson was spent going through the process of making a sandwich. But Naidoo wasn’t content to leave the project there – in line with the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme recently adopted by the school (which aims to educate children to succeed in a globalising world), she felt she could turn the project into something that inspires children to take action to address problems and become global citizens.

She already knew McGinley from volunteer work that they had done together before and decided to use the opportunity to support Daily Bread Org.

“How it works is that every week each class has a turn to provide the food for the project. We sent home a letter asking families who wanted to participate to please send an extra sandwich and piece of fruit to school on Thursdays. The teachers are invited to bring in a bottle of pre-mix juice if they want to, and on the day, all this is gathered up and taken to the crèche.

“Our children come from good homes, and I want this to teach them that helping people is not just taking money out of your pocket to donate financially, it’s not just sending the staff to volunteer somewhere, it’s using your own hands to help.”

The lesson seems to have sunk in. Every week sandwiches and fruit arrive in the delivery boxes set up in the school reception, and some children have gone even further to help.

“It feels good to give back,” explained Diya Maharaj, a 12-year-old in Grade 6 at the school who has used her own pocket money to contribute to the project.

“There are so many children who are underprivileged and sometimes those of us who aren’t, take things for granted.

“When making the sandwiches, I imagine in my mind the person receiving it and smiling because it has made their day.”

To Daily Bread Org, it really has created a number of smiles. Thanks to the donations that feed the crèche every Thursday, the budget has allowed a cooked meal to be provided every Friday – not just for the children at the crèche itself, but for every child in the informal settlement.

“The children who come to our crèche come to school because it isn’t safe for them on the streets,” McGinley explained. “I think a lot of children are blinkered from the hardships of others, and that’s what makes this effort so special.

“I can’t tell you how grateful we are for this. Charity begins at home, and I’m so glad that these children have learned to care for others.”

Daily Bread Org is always looking for support from the public. They used to run the only homeless shelter in the northern suburbs and would love to open it again with support from the public. They are also looking for sponsors to help organise an event to honour unsung heroes in the community.

Details: Daily Bread Org Facebook page (@dailybreadcharity.org)

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