Covid-19 Learning at Home and Food Relief RSA

The buzzword word for 2020 seems to be RESILIENCE.

Covid-19 lockdown has touched the lives of everyone around the world and only recently reached its peak in South Africa. How are people coping with the many changes that are happening around them? How is everyone staying focused and motivated? And what are we even talking about when we say ‘resilience’?

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from stress, adversity, failure, challenges, or even trauma. Here, at Thanda, we see resilience as our five Game-changing Skills at work. These five skills are those that we aim to instil in the hearts and minds of the little ones in our ECD, the teenagers in our After-school Programme and the gogos in our Organic Farming Programme are: Perspective, Creativity, Empathy, Critical Thinking and Self-Esteem. Resilience is in many ways, our end goal.

Yet we don’t always get to see whether the skills of our children and farmers have actually translated into the ability to be resilient. While the Covid-19 pandemic has brought widespread trauma to the world, it also provided a unique opportunity for everyone to put their skills to work at the same time, enabling us to see how everyone is coping.

Our farmers have shown incredible resiliency by creating food sustainability for their families and have not required food parcels as they continue to plant more crops. Since April, they have achieved the following:

• Produced R1 349 400 worth of vegetables

• Milled 1.1 tonne of maize within the community at our Agri-Hub

• Planted 133 762 seedlings of an array of colourful nutritious vegetables

We have also found examples of children being resilient and remaining positive by finding ways to creatively entertain, educate and keep themselves busy at home. Qiniso, a teenager and our star skater, demonstrates empathy by using his time to help those in his community who are not able to help themselves. He tells us, “My friend and I usually go to Mr. Khathi (he’s the grandpa in the community) and ask him what we can help with around the house, usually we clean the yard, cut the grass and also the graveyard. We love helping him because he is very old and there is no one to do these things for him.”

Guardians have been super-stars over the last 6 months and we are incredibly impressed with how well they pivoted to become actively involved in their children’s learning - many of them for the first time ever! The results are in from some evaluations we did of the Learning at Home programme and they show that a whopping 95% of households implemented the Learning at Home activities. Of those, 47% of households implemented the activities fully and the rest to varying degrees. With the help of weekly home visits and letters of support, the quality of implementation by guardians in our Fun Foundations playgroups programme improved by 120% between May and July, and 80% of guardians overall reported that they have learned something new from the Learning at Home programme.

Kwanele takes care of her nephew, Sfundo, and tells us about the time they spend together learning new things during the Learning at Home programme “We like to sit together and talk and play. We even tell each other fairy tales. He is the one who reminds me that we have activities to do.” We are so proud of the resilience shown by our Covid Relief Team of staff, who bravely come to work to make all this happen. Nokuthula, our Early Learning Manager, is one such individual. She says it makes her happy to see the children embracing this new way of learning and she is delighted when she sees the correspondence come through from guardians on her Learning at Home WhatsApp Support Group “They send us videos and pictures of the kids immersed in the activity,” she says. “For example, they assist each other with collecting card board boxes to make different types of shapes, or they send a picture of the finished product. The parents and their kids are very dedicated and I’m grateful for their effort.” I’m so grateful for Nokuthula and the rest of the team’s effort to make these results possible- see below for some of the photos sent from the homes!

Nokuthula visiting the home of Sekhona, a child whose empathy skills improved by 200% during 2019! Sekhona seems to be excelling at home and her mother says, “Whenever I am quiet she says, ‘you think too much, something must’ve upset you’. She is smart!”

Other children joined their grandparents, who are part of Thanda’s Nisela Organic Farming Programme, on the farms and helped with various tasks. Mdex, our Organic Farming Manager has noticed that the children are sponges for knowledge on the farms. “They are not only irrigating,” he says, “but they are also learning how to raise the beds and plant the seedlings -Learning things like spacing. They are absorbing and wanting to learn everything possible.”

Thanks to the generosity and flexibility of our donors to enable us to pivot our offerings, we are excited about the future of our community. Resilience is so important to us because it means real, sustainable change and these colourful stories of success against all odds keep us inspired and motivated to continue working together with our staff, beneficiaries and you. Thank you for your role in changing so many lives.