SHORTLY after fighting for the clinic in his ward to extend its trading hours with an extra day, Ward 10 Councillor, Lenny Moodley, has encouraged his community to turn dumpsites into food gardens and wants to create a specific helpline for children in need.
Moodley has been juggling several projects in his ward, each occupying a special place in his heart. After managing to have Malabar Clinic operate on both Mondays and Fridays, instead of just Fridays as was previously the case, and now pushing to have it open on a Wednesday as well, he continued focusing on other issues in his ward.
According to Moodley, he wants to inspire the youth to rise up and take a stand within the community and he already had a meeting with the speaker’s office to start an anti-bullying campaign at schools.
“I feel like there is no support for kids that are being bullied at school. Starting in Ward 10, we are planning on hosting a live audience play that will address the social ills in our community, especially bullying,” Moodley explained.
“A lot of our youngsters, who are victims of bullying, come from broken families and sometimes the children bully the teachers too. I have been receiving a lot of calls from people asking me what we can do about this. I’m having meetings with various stakeholders as I want to do this thoroughly.
“After this campaign with the play, I’d like to set up a 24-hour line where teenagers can call freely and say that they are feeling suicidal, struggling with drugs, have issues with their sexuality or are being abused. I want them to know that there is someone that they can call who would do everything in their power to help,” he said.
Moodley has also made great strides with the ward 10 community garden project.
“We started in Extension 6, where we found dump sites and turned them into gardens. Every week there is a cleaning up of the dump sites and whatever is harvested from the gardens goes straight back to the community.
“We are trying to empower our residents by planting and eating from it. The harvest thus goes to feeding schemes, which means that this is essentially a local, economical, development plan. I see a lot of people begging on the streets and we are trying to plan what we can do to stop that,” he added.
In addition to these projects, the ward now has eight water tanks in strategic places that were donated by generous sponsors. Ward assistant, Vinash Indarjee, said that they really drove the water tank project and managed to get sponsorships.
“Since our office took over we have been fighting for our ward. We don’t sleep, we are continuously working and we have a good team. We also had sponsors build the foundations for the water tanks, have identified the hot spots where we don’t get water during outages, and have placed the tanks in different places,” Indarjee explained.
Moodley added that crime has also been a huge issue in the community and that copper pipes, cables and water meters are being stolen. There are also regular burglaries and they wish to focus on better security in the ward.
“Crime is terrible here and we will be hosting a business breakfast in November to raise funds for an anti-crime campaign for cameras and a control room in Ward 10. We are trying to raise approximately R200 000,” he said.
“Our ward has been terribly neglected and we would appreciate the support of the community. We are in need of fertilisers for our gardens and urge people to make use of the clinic every Monday and Friday,” Moodley said.
