Every month, more than 30 CAST Food Parcel volunteers go out into homes looking for the poorest families in our city and its surrounds. Once these people are on our Food Parcel Programme, they are visited each month by the volunteers support and counsel, working with the families to find solutions to their situations.
At the end of 2011, Carel Buitendag—a member of Westville Baptist and volunteer with the business forum in KwaDabeka, called us to say he had ten bicycles for us.
Carel’s company, Fig Tree Consultants, ran an end-of-year team building exercise at Smith & Nephew: It was a race in which each team had to build a bicycle from the parts provided. The ten new bicycles were given to CAST.
As they were assembled by amateurs in a hurry, some of the bicycles needed a little fixing up first. Some men in the church got to work turning handlebars around, replacing tubes and reversing pedals. Soon they were ready for use.
We decided to use the bicycles for the workers who visit the homes each week. Three were allocated to Lamontville and Noodsberg, and two to KwaDabeka and Cato Manor. When we handed them over to the excited volunteers, we discovered that several had never ridden a bicycle before. The practice runs were hilarious!
