I came back to the office after a run on Tuesday afternoon, to find a bakkie loaded full with oranges waiting for me.

We’d gotten an email last week from a farming couple who, among other things, grow novas (naartjie / orange cross fruits). They were selling them to raise funds for Just Friends, which runs a feeding scheme for the elderly in need. Each month Just Friends puts together food packs and distributes them to 110 pensioners in need. The farmers were offering to donate $1 off of every $6 pocket of oranges. We signed up for 20 pockets, thinking we’d deliver them to other organisations in need across the city, to further extend the donation.

We offloaded the 20 pockets into the back of my Nissan March – and I watched as my little car sank lower and lower to the ground.

“Don’t worry, the farmer delivering them told me – the pockets only weigh 12kgs each. That’s only 240kgs we’re loading into your car – that’s like three or four adults.”

Hmmm. It’s not often I cram four adults into the boot of my supermini sized vehicle.

Meanwhile, we’d barely made a dent in the bakkie load – and it had been standing firmly on its four tyres the whole time. We joked that I’d be fine driving the pockets around town, as long as I didn’t come across any potholes. Like yeah right, where in Harare are you going to drive pothole free?

The next morning, I found my car windows fogged up and my steering wheel sticky with the sweat of 2,000 oranges. The car smelt sweet and ripe and full of promise.

I wiped the windows down and set out with a friend to deliver the fruit.

Our first stop was a home for orphaned children in Harare. When we got there, we learnt that they currently support 96 children, ranging from infants to teenagers. We opened the boot to reveal 20 pockets of oranges – but then had to tell them to offload six.

The matron was thrilled and grateful for the donation, but in the face of 96 children needing three meals a day, suddenly I felt less than generous. The caretaker who helped us offload the sacks of oranges said “just six?” and the matron seemed chagrined at his apparent ingratitude.

“How can you say ‘just six?’” she chastised him. “That is six more than we had before.”

But the exchange gave me pause for thought – what is the English expression that allows you to specify a quantity without running the risk of seeming grasping or operating from a position of scarcity? Just six. Only six. They are both accurate phrases which help to explain that out of a larger total quantity you are to take a portion of the whole. But when more is always better, how can taking fewer not seem inevitably less satisfying? And when you have 96 children to look after, surely wanting more oranges rather than fewer makes perfect sense? I comforted myself by thinking well, if there are 100 or so oranges in a pocket, at least these children each get an orange a day for the next week. We asked them what else they needed and they said “Everything.”- Laundry soap, bathing soap, dish soap, salt, mealie meal, meat, beans . . . the mind boggles at the logistics and coordination required to feed 96 children three meals each day.

Our next stop was the local church, which runs a weekly food support service for low-income residents in the area. The woman at reception was friendly and efficient – we drove round to the back and offloaded our pockets right into their storeroom, which was already filled with sacks of mealie meal, beans and kapenta. Each week, volunteers come and decant the larger bags into family sized-packs before distributing them to the people who come.

We donated the balance of the oranges to a group which supports prisoners in remand. I felt kicked in the guts to realise how insignificant even our 7 pockets of oranges was in the face of the enormous need in our prisons. There are currently 1400 prisoners in remand – if there are around a hundred oranges in each bag, that’s barely one orange each for half of them. I thought back to the bakkie that delivered the fruit – you’d need to fill that entire bakkie with supplies and you probably still wouldn’t have enough for one meal for 1400 people.

Prison conditions in Zimbabwe were particularly bad during the shortages through 2008, but they have reportedly improved in the past two years. However, even with the improvements, prisoners – even prisoners on remand who have yet to be convicted of any crime and may well be unjustly imprisoned – do not feature high on budget allocations, or on most Zimbabweans’ list of those deserving of support and attention.

On the weekend, the Sunday Mail featured an article headlined Inmates go for four years without eating meat. Reportedly, detainees “at Harare Remand and Chikurubi female prisons were beginning to show signs of malnutrition.” But not all of the comments on this article were sympathetic of the detainees’ plight.

If a children’s home looking after 96 orphans struggles to find everything they need, what more 1400 remand prisoners who do not garner the same instinctive public support?

The need out there is enormous. Delivering our 240 kgs of novas made my car lighter, but left my spirit conflicted by the size of the problem compared with our small efforts to address it. But I suppose it’s like that Robert F Kennedy quotation:

Each time a woman stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

The nova fundraiser generated over $500 for Just Friends. The farmers are now also selling navel oranges to raise funds for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (minimum order 10 x 10kg pockets for $60, delivered directly to your location in Harare). I recently heard Patricia Glyn estimate that only 3% of charitable donations in the world go to animal welfare. So buy some novas or navel oranges for yourself and others – and make a difference to your community.

To find out more, email gandboys [at] zol [dot] co [dot] zw

This entry was posted on April 11th, 2011 at 10:56 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.