Farmworkers on a Bottelary wine farm will sleep extra snug this winter with brand-new blankets collected for them by cyclists from the northern suburbs of Cape Town in a recent blanket drive.
Riding 20 km from Goodwood Fire Station, some 20 cyclists, many of them from the City’s Disaster Management cycle team, arrived at the Revival Worship Centre in Brackenfell early on Saturday morning to hand the blankets over to the church. Other clubs involved were the Cyclopaths and the Tygerberg Tigers.
Blanket drive an immense success
Revival Worship Centre reached out to the 82 families who live and work on Bellevue Wine Estate on Bottelary Road after a chance meeting between congregation member Peter August and the farm’s lorry driver John Tieties outside a local warehouse.
“We started talking in general about the needs of local farmworkers,” said August, “and later during a subsequent visit to the farm it became clear that factors such as alcohol abuse, domestic violence, poverty and illiteracy were crippling this community, something that prompted the church to get involved.”
Receiving the cyclist Duncan Daniels from the church thanked them for their efforts in extending a warm hand to the less privileged.
“The blanket drive was an immense success,” he said. “It means so much to us and such a blessing to the community that people have put their hands in their pockets to reach out to the poor.”
As part of the outreach the church also provides fresh bread and cooked meals to the community every Friday and hosted a career day for the farm children.
“These children grow up believing that their only prospect in life is to work on the farms as their parents do,” said August.
