The outreach was held at the Westfort informal settlement on Saturday. Photo: Dewald Pretorius
A Moot charity last week launched an initiative to help Westfort informal settlement families grow their own vegetables.
Dare to Love spokesperson Daryl Hardy Westfort had an influx of poor families. “The conditions are dire, another most immediate [need] is fresh nutritious food,” he said.
“However we all know the true saying that goes: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but give him a fishing rod and you feed him for life.”
“Which was why Dare to Love, together with Gardens of Life has set out to teach Westfort to grow their own nutritional vegetables last Saturday.”
He said the community also stepped in to help make the initiative a success.
“We planted spinach, tomatoes and cabbage seedlings with them,” he said.
He said the plants were planted in tyres.
The outreach was held at the Westfort informal settlement on Saturday. Photo: Supplied
The community leader of the project, Lunga Jaceni said settlement residents appreciated the help.
“We are also very impressed with the quick response we got from Dare to Love – we asked them for help and they responded the following day with help.”
Jaceni has been living at the informal settlement since 2006.
“For us, as a community, initiatives such as these are very good,” he said.
The outreach was held at the Westfort informal settlement on Saturday. Photo: Supplied
“This outreach will definitely make a difference.”
Hardy said they were happy to be of assistance to the residents at the informal settlement.
The informal settlement is the remainder of the Westfort Leprosy hospital, which was established in 1897, while Daspoort Hospital was built on the southern extent of Daspoortrand ridge in the 1880s to treat smallpox.
The outreach was held at the Westfort informal settlement on Saturday. Photo: Dewald Pretorius
In 1902 Westfort hospital was added and the complex gradually developed into a leprosarium and a psychiatric institution.
When the leprosy “asylum” on Robben Island closed down in 1931, Westfort became the only multiracial institution in the country to treat the illness.
The outreach was held at the Westfort informal settlement on Saturday. Photo: Supplied
Since the hospital closed, some 5 000 individuals have occupied the buildings informally while the municipality has identified Westfort as a site for the development of mixed-income housing.
It has neither electricity nor running water.
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