81) Child Welfare

A week or two after reading the article about Child Abuse in Witbank I met a woman in the library. Her name was Leigh Lewis. She was about to walk home and it had started to rain heavily so I offered her a lift. As we drove to her house she told me that she was a member of the Child Welfare Fund Raising Committee. She told me that although her committee did not have direct contact with abused children as they did not have the qualifications they could use the talents that they did have to raise money to help pay for social worker who had the ability to help. She asked me if I would like to join them and invited me to a meeting the next week to see if I thought I might be interested in becoming a member.

Isn’t it funny the things one remembers about people? Leigh once told me that her daughter-in-law was very wasteful and that she would only eat bread that was fresh that day. If there was bread left over from the day’s loaf, which apparently there often was, her daughter-in-law would throw it away. I feel quite silly to think that I remember that unimportant fact when there is so much I have forgotten.

Anyway back to the story. The following week I collected Leigh and we went to a meeting of the Child Welfare Fund Raising Committee. The chairlady was Shirley Suttill, her husband worked for Highveld Steel, the big steel works in Witbank. She was a very hard working woman who had been on the committee for many years and had helped to raise many thousands of Rand for Child Welfare. She had been awarded the Witbank Citizen of the Year for her work. She was very friendly and so were the other seven or eight women. They were very keen for me to join them. As I think I have said before, if you are prepared to do some work you are always welcome on a committee. I was very pleased to join as I had been so shocked at the extent of the abuse and thought that anything I could do to help would be a pleasure, and that’s what it turned out to be, a real pleasure. I worked with that committee until we left Witbank and had a great deal of fun. We held cake sales, jumble sales, dances and raffles, we put on film shows, fashion shows and carols by candlelight evenings. A very popular way of raising funds was to have a ‘Faggots and Mushie Peas Night,’ these were always well attended and great fun. We usually ended the evening with an English pub like sing along. One of our big fund raising projects was our annual golf day. The first week in November was Child Welfare week all over South Africa and we spent the week bringing the plight of abused children to the notice of the public. On the Saturday of that week we would have a street collection. To cover all the shopping centres that we wanted to we would have to call on all our friends who worked for other charities to help out. This meant that when the charity that they were working for had a collection day they would call on us. Almost every time there was a collection day we would be out there shaking our tins. We would collect for the Red Cross, the SPCA, The Salvation Army, for the homes for the blind or the mentally handicapped. If you were at the same shopping centre more than once people would remember you and ask, “Weren’t you collecting for something else last week?” The worst job of the whole year was to count all the money from those tins. I think we had over 100 tins, which we borrowed from the council and had to put our own labels on before collection day and then on the Sunday after the collection we would all get together to count the money. It was mostly in small change, 1 cent, 2 cent and 5 cent pieces. The public when asked to contribute would say sweetly “You may as well have all this” and empty all the small change that they had in their wallet into your tin. Not only did it weigh a ton and you had to hold it for the whole time you were on duty but it was also a pest to count. I know they meant well but I used to think, “Why can’t we have a few nice light bank notes instead?”

Cake sales were also very lucrative. Each year we would hold two or three and depending on how many women we had on the committee at the time. We would all be given a target of how many cakes we would be expected to bring. We were told we could ‘beg, borrow or steel them’ and many of the women would rally round all their family and friends who would help them with the quota. Being pretty new in the town I did not have many friends so I often ended up baking my whole quota. We liked to hold our cake sales outside one of the large shopping centres on a busy Saturday morning near pay day. We needed to get permission from the town council for that, which was not a problem as long as we got our application in before any other charity that wanted to hold a cake sale on that day. I remember that when the council sent us our letter of permission they would also send us a letter from the public health department setting out the standards we had to meet. Food stuffs all had to be kept covered, those handling food were not supposed to handle money as well and there was to be no smoking at the table. All very understandable but we would laugh at some of the regulations. We were told that we were not allowed to blow into the plastic bags that we used to pack the cakes in. We were not supposed to sneeze or pick our noses while serving and anyone with eczema or a cold should not be allowed behind the counter. We often wondered who, if anyone, would have bought our cakes if we had not obeyed those rules.

Cake Sale

Child Welfare also had a second hand shop that was staffed by a band of volunteers. There was one woman in charge of the whole project. Her name was Sheila Bruckman, although she was a voluntary worker she worked in the shop every afternoon. There was a paid mornings only worker called Phyllis Vinnicombe and an African lady called Lilly Bodbe who mended and ironed the clothes we sold. A few of the women who were on the fund raising committee also did voluntary shifts once a week.

We encouraged school children to do their bit for the children who were not as blessed as they were. We had two trophies that we awarded each year to the Junior and the High School that raised the largest amount of money for our cause. We would place tins in each school and we would have to collect them and replace them.

Each year for the golf day we would call on every business that we could think of and ask for donations to help with the running costs and prizes. The Golf Club would of course run the golf side of the day but we would provide cakes for morning tea, we would supply the lunch and then snacks to go with the drinks at the prize giving at the end of the day. Our Golf days were always popular as we put a lot of work into them. I must admit Child Welfare is rather an easy charity to work for. There is no one who will refuse to help needy and abused children and we found that the men and women who played golf were particularly generous.

One year the Child Welfare National Council of South Africa, to which we were affiliated got involved in the first Red Nose Day that was held in South Africa. We were sent boxes and boxes of red noses and asked to sell them I remember they were horrid things. They were not held on with an elastic around ones head as I had expected but they had a slit in the back of them that was it was supposed to just hold firmly on the nose. Some people’s noses were so small that the slit was too large and the red nose continually fell off. Others of us had larger noses and the slit was too small and pinched. I don’t think they fitted anyone at all. We all complained. Oh well I suppose we only had to wear them once a year for a few hours while we were on duty selling them.

Red Noses

Because we were collecting money for Child Welfare we were expected to send one or two representatives to attend the monthly meeting of the main welfare committee. None of us really like this task and we usually tried to get out of it. The social workers would report on the cases that they had on hand at the time and it could be upsetting to listen to. It was important though as it reminded us of what we were doing all that work for.