Executive Director's Blog

Executive Director’s Blog: October 2007

I have just returned from what has been the experience of a lifetime. Eventia, as you know, has been putting CSR at the top of the agenda for well over the last 18 months. Not only have we developed the ‘Eventia One Future’ programme that encompasses education of how to reduce our carbon footprint along with planting trees in a protected forest development in the UK to offset what we can’t reduce – but we have also been running a series of seminars and forums in conjunction with CIT magazine over the last year.

This joint effort culminated in the CIT CSR Challenge which took place last month in South Africa. CIT Editor Yasmin Razak and I took nine agencies kindly hosted by South Africa Tourism on what will remain a totally unforgettable experience. We visited and worked on a project for Habitat for Humanity - a charity focusing on integrating communities by teaching skills that will enable them to become self-sufficient, and assisting them to build their own homes with a volunteer programme.

The project that we visited is the Mziki Agri Village in Ixopo region of KwaZulu Natal. The concept was to demonstrate an example of how a CSR incentive could work and to reward those agencies who had demonstrated over the past year how much effort they had put into developing their own CSR programmes within their organisations and within their client base.

We teamed up with South Africa Tourism to bring all the elements together.

We were all asked to write diaries, take as many pictures as possible and - for those who had video technology - to take video clips so we could share with others how these projects work and the effect that they have in the local communities. These are being amalgamated into the next issue of CIT in a report by Yasmin and will also be included in the next edition of the CSR guide which comes out later this year.

I am currently setting up our own Mziki Project dedicated section within our Eventia CSR page which will contain the images that I took over the week, plus information on the project itself and the organisations involved.

To give you a taster, here is a short excerpt from my written diary:

Day 1:
I’ve just arrived at Kings Grant Country retreat after travelling 10 long hours from the UK to Ixopo. I’ve been full of excitement and trepidation of this trip, my dreams have been vivid in the weeks leading up to it, sometimes flashbacks of animal sightings and past experiences from my first trip to SA three years ago and some scary insect moments of snakes and spiders. I knew I shouldn’t have watched Arachnophobia before coming here…..but most potent have been my thoughts about the families that we are coming to help and what their lives are like. My mind is full of questions like: how will we communicate with them? Will we bond with them? What will be the impact on their lives of our visit? How do they live? What is their daily routine? And how different will it be to ours back home? My thoughts are interrupted as Aileen is telling me to hurry up and not make us late as we are being called for lunch…..

We are greeted by the staff who perform a traditional dance for us where they kick their legs high up in the air and wiggle their bums to the beat of hands clapping and beautiful harmonies they sing. We are told the higher they kick the better marriage material they are (it’s all females at this stage). The dowry here is 11 cows, God does that really still happen? So the young girls practice to improve their chances of being chosen for marriage….it seems a bit ironic as this venue used to be a convent when it first opened in 1871.

Day 2:
I’m exhausted but satisfied, we worked hard today up at 7am, laying bricks, lifting them, mixing concrete, filling the dagga in between the bricks. I partnered up with John Strachan (Maximillion). He’s a good hearted Scotsman with a wicked sense of humour; he laid the bricks and I filled the dugga. It was tough but a good day. We started the day with a community prayer of blessing and protection over the project and were then split in to two teams. We played with the kids and talked with the adults while doing our work. Our team is building for a single Mum - Tholakele Ngubane- who has a four-year-old son and a three-year-old orphan to look after. That happens a lot here as parents are lost through HIV/AIDS there are a lot of children who are orphaned and either taken in by the grandparents or other family members.

Tholakele’s family and friends came to help us build and we got about half way today on the outside walls; not a bad effort according to Sue and Gavin, our site managers. I feel quite bonded with this community. They are friendly lovely people who care for each other so much, they really rely on each other, they have to - their lives depend on it. What struck me is the difference between how they interact compared with us back home in the UK. There is so much more consideration for each other and interest in the welfare of the community - it was very heart-warming to feel this. And the thing is that these people don’t want handouts, it’s not about that, it’s about empowering them to make a difference in their own lives, to take control and do something to change their future. I feel really good that we are able to be a part of that process, it really is a privilege to be here.

Day 3:
Another hard day on the site, it got cold today and we kept working in the rain right through to the afternoon, we really wanted to get as much done as possible, knowing that when we leave the builders will be there by themselves working hard to finish the houses for these ladies. When we returned to our rooms at the end of the day I was so tired and cold. We had hot showers and spent some time relaxing in our rooms writing our diaries and preparing for our discussions in the evening. And the dominant thought in my mind was that while I could come back to this hot shower and warm bed, a nice plate full of food waiting for me, those families that we are helping are still living in their mud huts, with no running water, no electricity, holes in the roofs and only one mattress for the women and children to sleep on with a few blankets. It just doesn’t seem right, I know we are doing something to help but it doesn’t seem enough, I just wish we could finish the houses, I almost don’t want to go on the rest of the trip, I’d rather stay here and do more than move on to the ecological sector.

We visited a school this morning which was an amazing experience. There are 350 children in this school and the government gives the equivalent of 9 pence per child per year to feed them! They have one meal a day which is fed to them at school and they have to wait over the weekend to eat again on Monday at school. The meals are boiled carrots or other vegetables that the school can grow on site. Despite their circumstances, the kids were amazing in their attitude, so happy with the little that they have and so well behaved. They told us what they wanted to be when they grew up and performed songs and recited poems for us. The most heartbreaking was the little girl who said when she grows up she wants to be a white lady. We gave them some donations of equipment and clothing that we bought with us. We also agreed afterwards to leave extra money to buy some sporting equipment for them and the other schools in the region. It only costs £150 to provide cricket, football and netball equipment for that number of kids - I was absolutely amazed at this!

Projects like The Mziki Village are so important because instead of solving the problem and providing handouts they are providing an infrastructure so the community can start to help themselves and become self sufficient by developing an agri-farm which will support the entire area in the years to come. This trip was a great learning for us all, I feel very inspired and humbled by the experience; it was a complete emotional roller coaster. We have a great opportunity in our industry to assist and support by running CSR-based incentives and I personally think it’s extremely exciting to see the positive influence we can have on the world around us simply by providing creative solutions to clients.

Our CSR webpage is under development by our working party so watch this space for when we launch as there will be loads of information on there to help us all. 
 

Yours,

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