The drama of getting her former husband to court to set maintenance for their children was the first in a series of events that left Karen defeated, cynical and a single parent in every sense of the word. Her husband avoided the maintenance court for eight months.
Home-based health care is about to replace the system whereby community health workers are the care givers to those in the Western Cape that do not have access to hospitals and clinics. This follows a decision by the EU to end its association with the community health workers.
No image available
/ 14 September 2002
Monwabisi Booi used to believe that the environment was a liberal issue, irrelevant to basic needs. "It was an academic debate," he says, "all about the saving of the white rhino." But factors in his life collaborated to pull him into the debate, converting him from political activist to energy champion.
In March Melvin Muggels (18) was sentenced to 15 years for helping to saw off the head of a mentally disabled man in Mitchells Plain. He had pleaded guilty and had not planned the deed, which spared him life imprisonment. Muggels was participating in a plea-bargaining pilot project.
"I’m in the group, Miss, because I don’t want to hurt other people in the same way that adults hurt me. I don’t want to do it, but every time I think of them doing it to me I must do it to someone else", says a 15-year-old patient of Child Abuse Therapeutic and Training Services.
Boasting about their crime led to the apprehension of two boys who stole a computer from their school in the Cape Flats. The boys seemed destined to join the thousands of juveniles awaiting trial at prisons throughout South Africa, but an innovative and carefully mediated community court saved them their enrolment at the local "university of crime".
Five rand for five litres of wine is the Friday reward for a hard week’s work on a Northern Cape farm. The farmer deducts the money from his workers’ pay packets and there is no limit to the amount of <i>papsakke</i> — thin plastic sacks of often toxic wine — that they can take home.
Jan Fortuin grew up on a grain farm in Malmesbury in the Western Cape. He dared to dream that he might farm one day, but knew that his chances were almost non-existent. He followed the route of many country children, moving to the city to make a living.
There are signs that the new fishing quota system is benefiting previously disadvantaged coastal communties.