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/ 5 October 2002

Health-care funds run dry

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.

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/ 14 September 2002

Champions of energy

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.

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/ 19 August 2002

Pleading for speedy justice

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.

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/ 26 July 2002

In the mind of the molester

"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.

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/ 12 July 2002

Justice without jail

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".

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/ 28 June 2002

Who will stop the dop?

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.

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/ 31 May 2002

Finding common ground

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.