A CAPE Town-based foundation, called Kasi Angels, recently made a stop in Komani where they gave away 620 pairs of shoes to seven local schools.
The schools that benefited included Bolotwa Primary, Bubele High, Dlakavu Junior Secondary School, Nokwanda Senior Primary, Nonibe Junior Secondary School (where a pair was also given to the caretaker), Hala Senior Secondary School and Mtwaku Junior School, while the Kasi Angels visited other areas like Qumbu and Maclear.
Founder and managing director of Kasi Angels Foundation, Gerald Nomlala, believes that to most South African children, school is a no-go area if they don’t have or can’t afford a pair of school shoes.
“School shoes are not a luxury to a child, but a necessity that provides protection and comfort. Having school shoes builds self-confidence and dignity, which encourages children to attend school.
“Growing up and attending school without shoes can either break a child’s future or destroy it completely. Kids with broken shoes, or with no shoes at all, get ridiculed and end up not focusing on school work which leads to failing of grades or dropping out of school,” said Nomlala.
This is what triggered Nomlala to establish a programme called #9000Shoes, with the aim of donating 1 000 pairs across each of the country’s nine provinces in 2017. Since then the foundation has been collecting shoes from donors and paying for some from its purse to keep learners at school.
“We started an initiative that aims at changing the world, one child at a time, by triggering people’s minds that giving back has been our African culture, also an African way of showing Ubuntu which also has been a pillar that strengthens and builds us as Africans,” said Nomlala.
He said with the help of their donors and Kasi Angels’ ambassadors, they randomly drive to any city or province, armed with shoes and stop any school child in uniform who doesn’t have shoes or whose shoes are beyond repair.
The Angels exchange the old shoes for a new pair and capture photos which they instantly send to the actual donor of that pair. Each box has a name and contact details of the donor, whereby a child or parents can write, text or e-mail “a thank you message” to the original donor of that pair.
“We believe, by so doing, this will create a bond between the shoe donor and the recipient, and through this a relationship can escalate to getting more help in the form of bursaries and other school needs.
“These pictures can also be daily fed to our Kasi Angels website, FB pages and twitter, thus creating hype to followers, readers, donors and recipients. We humbly ask people to donate more pairs of Toughees shoes, so that we don’t have to buy shoes every year for the same learner,” he added.
The foundation also gave away three pairs of brand new pairs at the Komani-Karoo Express offices, to be given to any needy learner on a first come, first served basis.
The shoes are in sizes eight and nine.
