Dear All

Yesterday we managed to get 8 loads of aid out from the Randburg Methodist Church to Germiston City Hall and Reiger Park. We have now reached 7 places of need. Let me know if you have other places that need our support!
Today we will see where the need is greatest and send out more. Please bear in mind that we have a cold front hitting Joburg!!!!

Our list of needs (in no particular order) with the ongoing need for food and blankets:
Nappies, rubbish bags, Oros for the kids, any first aid items (large surgical gloves), medicines like Panado syrup and Immodium etc, toys, sanitary towels, soap and face cloths, tooth brushes and toothpaste, pilchards and eggs, margarine/butter, Purity baby food, baby bottles, baby formula, disinfectant, washing up liquid!!!!!!

An example of the needs out there: Jeppe Police Station is looking after 150 babies!!!!!

Thanks to everyone including Meltz, Five Roses, Randburg Chamber of Commerce, PEP at Darras Shopping Centre, Pick n Pay Brightwater Commons, Primedia and so many others – your help is an absolute God-send!!!

DELIVERY POINTS FOR AID:
Linden CPF have agreed that residents in the area can drop off donations to the Trauma Centre at the station in Boundary Road, Linden OR Randburg Methodist Church at the corner of Bram Fischer Drive and Grove in Blairgowrie OR
Blairgowrie Residents Against Crime at 5 Jean Road, Blairgowrie OR
Rosebank Union Church at St Andrews and William Nicol Drive, Sandton OR
Bedfordview Methodist in Van Buuren Road, Bedfordview OR
Also Methodist Church in Primrose

MONEY DONATIONS CAN BE MADE TO:
Randburg Methodist Church
Standard Bank Randburg
A/C: 021649995
Branch Code: 01800590
REFERENCE: REFUGEES
OR
You can donate money through: www.easigiving.co.za/randburgmethodistchurch, or www.easigiving.co.za/xenophobia.(www.backabuddy.co.za, and www.easigiving.co.za)

With kind regards,
xxxxxxx

South Africa has a long history of movement of labour within the country and within the region. Have we forgotten that workers from Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland risked their lives to mine the minerals that built our country’s economy?
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To that I would like to add the fact that when our brothers in South Africa were in need, we were there for them. My country welcomed many refugees from South Africa fleeing Apartheid, especially after the June 16 events.

On top of that, our countries, “the Frontline States,” (1) were frequently attacked by South Africa, with the complicity of the United states, for harbouring ANC, PAC and brothers and sisters belonging to others parties. During these attacks, our nationals were also killed, but we saw it as a loss to war. We were waging a war and supporting our siblings across the border.

Why is it that now these same siblings hack and murder us when we need them? We helped them when they were in need for ideological reasons. Why won’t they help us when we’re in need for survival reasons (food, livelihood, a roof, etc.)? It is indeed true that…

A: The collapse of apartheid and the advent of democracy in South Africa was regionally supported by a group of southern African states called the Frontline States. These were Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and, from 1980, Zimbabwe. The Frontline States were formed in 1970 to co-ordinate their responses to apartheid and formulate a uniform policy towards apartheid government and the liberation movement. For the liberation movement in South Africa, the formation of the Frontline States was a welcomed development and a new front in the fight against apartheid.
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B: Support from the African frontline states was crucial, and it came at great human and economic costs.
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C: At the height of apartheid racism and discrimination parents even had mea and ways of reminding themselves that they are human beings and they belong to Africa. This included naming their children in a manner that maintained this memory. Phyllis Naidoo writes about a South African couple who were exiled in Lesotho and named their first child “Le Rona Re Batho” (We too are people). This forms a theme of a real story where the father to Le Rona Re Batho was killed together with about 44 other South Africans and Lesotho nationals in a raid by the apartheid forces of the time. These were people who were crying out proclaiming that they were also people and deserved to be treated like human beings. The same cry is made by those who have suffered through these senseless xenophobic attacks- “LE RONA RE BATHO!”
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A Different View of Reality

Anger and frustration in South Africa is a result of many problems, present and past. Before, and ever since 1994, countless promises were made and the majority of citizens truly believed that their lives would change dramatically – and quickly.

Previously deprived and/or excluded from proper accommodation, free education, good and free medical care, and employment, many expected this change to be instantaneous. But that incorrigible and tawdry collection of puerile braggadocio’s known as politicians spread a pernicious poison of lies and illusions, failing to live up to the responsibilities they were entrusted with.
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Yblog ZA

Globalization has impoverished us at an escalating pace for decades but, with the launch of our latest specator sport, it has evolved into something more ghastly than food riots, political repression, or natural disaster. The army’s deployment may bring about a lull, but this previously hidden or unadmitted nightmare is not going to go away. We’ve entered an utterly predictable, horrific phase in our war against poverty — a phase vaguely familiar and glimpsed briefly in a time and place to which all South Africans swore they’d never return.
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