Feeding The Self

06/10/2017

Hi all, apologies if you've hadd difficulty reaching us. There are some website problems that we're trying to resolve. In the meantime, you can get hold of me at [email protected] or call on 0735578909

27/02/2016

please check out our new youtube channel, with various videos from us and other NGOs. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8GP-nSe6J9-feCKUu9quOw

A collection of videos taken in Grahamstown, documenting our own activities and those of other NGOs. The main series (Grahamstown voices) intends to give the...

27/02/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JWj5GxT9g4

Zuki works for various NGOs in town, and here explains his motivations. Xhosa version also available. One of a series of voices in Grahamstown

27/02/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td4_Q5xfqoQ

Zuki works for various NGOs in town, and here explains his motivations. English version also available. One of a series of voices in Grahamstown.

27/02/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOf2lVDS-k

Sylvia works at FAMSA, a families NGO based near the clinic in town, along with a few other NGOs. Here she explains her motivations. One of a series of voice...

27/02/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0b_-rkQDk

Sylvia works at FAMSA, a families NGO based near the clinic in town, along with a few other NGOs. Here she explains her motivations. One of a series of voice...

25/02/2016

https://youtu.be/Lh5qtRSd53k

Mary Humphries runs the Raphael centre in town. Here, she tells us what got her into this work, and what keeps her going.

11/02/2016

Well, planting season has got us nice and busy. One of the things we’re up to at the moment is working with a cross-school group of children at the Lebone centre, just behind Kingswood. Lebone is a preschool that runs an afterschool for local primaries, and we’ve been working with them on building a little garden.
The idea is that we can teach these kids to become the seeds (pun fully intended) of taking garden projects into their own schools on the ground floor. Because they come in from different schools, they create connections that work a lot better than formal contacts. In this case, we had them digging around and tying up sticks with twine, and they loved it.
Like many preschools, Lebone has a small area that’s mostly ready to be gardened, and then lots of very hard packed soil from the children running around on it over the years. On the bright side, the good soil is next to JoJo tanks, so there’s plenty of water. The rest of the soil isn’t great, but that creates opportunities for building tyre beds and coke bottle planters to hang along the walls outside, so the kids can watch them grow.
So how do you set up a learning experience for the kids in the garden? The gardens themselves also have to be very easy to manage, so that even the small children can go in and do something useful (or at least not actively destructive). The two things you need to do is prepare well, and take advantage of anticipation.
Make sure that you do the heavy lifting – loosening the soil and tearing up the grass, picking and shaping your beds, and so on – and then leave it halfway. That way, when the learner comes in, in quite a short space of time they can pull out roots and bits of grass, outline the beds with something (we used bamboo and twine, but bricks or planks also work very well). That way, when they come in, they make a visible difference quickly, which encourages them to stay involved. If they see you chopping with a spade, they might have second thoughts about it.
Getting them to engage is about building anticipation. We work in small steps that end up having a big effect, and which the kids can get involved in at the end. Of course, you can’t go asking six year olds to dig your garden beds, but you can roughly dig the bed and then get them to pick out the grass and roots, as well as aerate the soil with a fork or small tool. Setting up the fence had to be done by adults, but securing it and making it pretty are things that the children could get excited about, and means that they regularly see the results of their work, both in and around the garden.
This week, the kids properly set up the whole garden in one quick session, increasing their engagement with it.

10/02/2016

https://youtu.be/QoNy7IpqHko

Want to know how to use the indigenous bamboo that grows around the Eastern Cape? Here's a brief intro, by Chirag Patel (in English) and Phatuxolo Wayi (in X...

23/01/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUKj0AtRPsI

The kids at St Mary's have been great over the last year, doing everything from maintaining a great garden to teaching other groups of schoolkids to build ga...

17/01/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8_4SOBL4a8&feature=youtu.be

2016 bis looking to be a good year for Feeding The Self, especially with the St Mary's kids ready to teach the incoming class. This is Zuki's thoughts.

24/11/2015

https://youtu.be/GrRlZ1TN2qg

On the 19th of November, Feeding The Self took part in a two-day workshop with a clean up crew employed by the Adopt A River project. This is a short video i...