CONCLUDING VILLAGE RESEARCH

Supermarket

The NGO I worked with in the village is called Fanang Dialta, and helped arrange visits with a variety of people, entities, and businesses, including this little store that had a restaurant and bar attached.  The young women is the newly hired administrative assistant who is a fairly good English speaker but had no computer skills, but learned the keyboard very quickly.  The man who manages this store told me that his two primary challenges were theft (break-ins after hours) and competition.  Many of the men who have jobs work at the nearby platinum mine.

Social workers

These two women were in an office very near my lodging quarters and we had an extremely interesting conversation about lifestyles/situations/grants etc.  At one point I had to laugh, and told them that the conversation could easily have been in the U. S., which surprised them.  We were discussing high school students, and no matter how poor they were, they had to wear certain types of shoes, or pay money they didn't have for getting their hair done in dreads.  The interview gave me good material for my manual on financial choices and trade-offs.

Bakery workers  on morning shift (6-1) making the buns

Part of the NGO's operation is this bakery near the office.  They make white bread, brown bread, (both unsliced as the slicer doesn't have the right size of plug-in) and buns, and have one delivery van that takes to nearby villages.  The woman on the right is 28 and the others are in their 50's and 60's and glad to have a job and enjoy baking.  The also make scone on special order, usually for funerals, which are a big event, days long.  Most of the people in this community belong to the ZCC church which requires women to cover their hair and abide by other rules; it is a very conservative, patriarchal church.

Connie and Knowledge in front of office

This is the man with whom I worked who runs Fanang Dialta self-help project.  Its mission is to empower local communities to meet moral, social, and economic needs of children in a sustainable manner.  They get quite a bit of funding from the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund as they have a day-care operation and after-school care as well as home-based care.  A lot going on, so the bakery operation has been neglected and it's record keeping very bad, so part of my focus was on learning about their operation and offering suggestions on improvements. They want the bakery operation to become profitable to help support their social programs.