- Grove come to school
Grove is a software company and a group of lovely people from their Cape Town office volunteered to shut up shop for the day and come and get their hands dirty in our playground. For once the chosen Friday dawned bright and clear – what luck!
On arrival amid greetings and laughter they overwhelmed us with their thoughtful selection of non-perishable food to help with the feeding scheme: sacks of mealie meal and catering- size containers of peanut butter and spreads. The feeding scheme is a crippling expense and knowing this they made an all-out effort to fill the pantry. We hope they saw how much their care and generosity meant to us.
They also brought their own trendy clothes – for the second hand shop - which will sell in a flash and raise needed funds. It takes quite some co-ordination to put a gift of this magnitude together and Grove’s huge effort, especially that of Nelisa Nonkonyana who took on the role of organiser was, is, entirely remarkable.
Then it was time to tackle the task.
We have a lush thick lawn - plenty of natural water in Betty’s Bay - which the school’s not-so-young weed eater in the expert hands of its not-so-young operator keeps neatly cut and trimmed. It doesn’t weed the lawn though despite its name and there are hundreds of specimens of a weed with a rosette of green leaves that get harder and pricklier the older it gets. They’re not kind to bare hands and feet and the only way to get rid of them is to pull them out by their very long roots.
That was the one job. The other job was the hedge. Tarchonanthus bushes have been planted around the playground and they are being pruned to make a hedge to break the force of the North Wester wind in Winter. It’s strong enough quite often to make an adult stagger, so playtime is not much fun for small Pikkewyntjies when exposed to the full blast of the elements.
Our software fundis got stuck in and the kids immediately joined them only too keen to remove weeds too. In the tiresome way adults have, we wouldn’t let them use the screwdrivers but the ground was soft and they did pretty well with their small hands.
Not all the kids were keen to work, however – seeing it was playtime and especially because it was most enjoyable to be caught on camera by Nelisa.
Our Louise, cook, housekeeper and stalwart had baked scones for the troops and laid the tea table with an arrangement of flowers from Mooi Uitsig gardens in the middle. Like everyone else they appreciated her hospitality.
I’d like to tell you and I think I can because the compliment is to the staff of Pikkewyntjies that one of the volunteers who has a son at, as he put it, an expensive preschool in Somerset West said he has never seen there, such thoroughly nice kids as he saw at Pikkewyntjies that Friday.
