Early Mandela Day surprise for them
PATRONI Baloyi, an unemployed mother of seven children from Jim village outside Giyani could not believe her eyes when Giyani Community Radio station (GCR) presenters paid her and her family a visit on Friday to have lunch with them as part of Mandela Day celebrations.
PATRONI Baloyi, an unemployed mother of seven children from Jim village outside Giyani could not believe her eyes when Giyani Community Radio station (GCR) presenters paid her and her family a visit on Friday to have lunch with them as part of Mandela Day celebrations.
The lunch was organised by the station in conjunction with OK Grocery and Cuz-Cuz Foundation, and they donated groceries worth R1 000 from OK Grocery and clothes from Cuz-Cuz Foundation, a non-profit organisation that donates clothes to destitute families.
Baloyi said she never thought she would one day share a cup of coffee with the station’s presenters.
“I don’t know how to thank them for the visit. It’s hard to believe that such important people would visit my poor family. We depend on child grants as I am unemployed.
“My children are also unemployed and they also have children who stay with me,” said Baloyi.
Asked about the initiative, GCR’s marketing and business development manager, Clifford Moraba, said the station aimed to be accessible to the people it served.
“We want to be seen as a station that is on the ground servicing its people, a station that everybody would be able to access and interact with, not the kind that is glamorous and inaccessible to its listeners,” he said.
The OK Grocery manager, Grace Bilankulu-Khosa, which is part of Masingita Group of Companies, said the company has been involved in charity work in the area and the province.
“We normally give food-parcels to communities around Giyani during December time. We gave food parcels to more than 100 people at Nkuzana village last year,” she said.
Sophie Makhubele, a ward councillor, thanked GCR for the initiative, saying this helped the municipality achieve its goal to fast-track service delivery across all its wards.
“The municipality has programmes in which it identifies and provides food parcels to families in abject poverty, and what GCR did puts relief to those programmes,” she said, urging other companies to follow their example.
