Day Four in Cape Town

My fourth day in Cape Town was spent with the NGO Operation Hunger.

The mission of Operation Hunger in South Africa is pretty basic: to feed the hungry bellies of children.

They don’t have a grand scheme for ending hunger or eliminating the cycle of poverty (at lease that I saw)—they simply see a need and work to meet it.

Bless them for it.

It looks generally like this: Operation Hunger seeks out people in a community who are working to provide sustenance to its youth. Mostly these are women who get knocks on their door from starving children. This is where Operation Hunger comes in and provides resources—everything from money to nutritional powder that can be added to pots of soup they prepare—to these women as they open their homes.

In the shantytown that our group visited, Operation Hunger is in the process of doing a nutritional assessment. So our job was to weigh and measure about fifty or so children, ranging from 6 months to twelve years of age.

After this task was completed and we charted the results, we went to a local church that opens it’s door for three or four older women to prepare food and serve children after school who haven’t eaten in awhile. We ladled soup and sat with the children who were quietly sipping their lunch from Tupperware containers.

My brain is still cranking through this experience…but it was absolutely worthwhile, and I’m glad I set aside time for it.

In other news, we’re hitting very rough seas going around the cape. When I woke up this morning, we had rocked and rolled enough to displace everything on our bedside table. The good news is that we were exhausted enough from being in port for six days to sleep through the night without being bothered by it.

Daytime, of course, is another story.

Hello seasickness pills.

Love. Anna