HOPE Cape Town Nutrition Project
For more than six months now, HOPE Cape Town has been running a nutrition project in cooperation with the local organization Abalimi Bezekhaya (“the planters“ in isiXhosa, http://www.abalimi.org.za). Their programme “Harvest of Hope” (www.harvestofhope.org.za) assists local township farmers with the marketing and sales of their organically produced vegetables. Since the initiation of the cooperation, 20 vegetable bags are delivered to the HOPE community Delft each Tuesday. In cooking demonstrations, we are teaching HIV positive moms how to keep themselves, their babies and their families healthy through a balanced nutrition. The moms take vegetables home each week and exchange recipes and cooking methods in the following session. Meanwhile, the second group of moms has started on the programme. In order to make the project sustainable, the first group received special training in gardening and small-scale vegetable farming before leaving the programme and many mothers are already eagerly planning their own little vegetable garden.
We would like to give special thanks to our volunteer Laura Fiebig, who facilitated the project with lots of passion and commitment during the past six months. We also thank Xenia Trippel and Marie Brockhaus, students of human nutrition from the Hochschule Niederrhein, University of Applied Sciences in Moenchengladbach in Germany, for their input and their valuable assistance in the interim evaluation of the project.