The raindrops were literally drying on my helmet visor when I spotted Buffalo City traffic cops setting up their ATM at the entrance to the Gonubie cement road.
I mean, they were emptying pockets metres from the circle leading off the old R102 Farmarama circle.
Google tells me they were one minute away from where Anthropogene, the climate monster, came and bit off chunks of bitumen and road metal barriers.
That circle had turned to cavernous gravel, but there were the good men and women of our traffic department raising money which would go directly into filling those potholes, and all the other scabrous kilometres of road in Gonubie itself!
There ends the fairy-tale folks.
I berated myself in my helmet as I passed some poor sucker in a Japanese fridge-on-wheels with a blown up tyre: “Don’t die in a BCM crater!”
It can feel impossible to find meaning out of this present hellscape envisioned and painted 540 years ago by Hieronymus Bosch.
But the sun is out and you had a precious 57 hours of sort-of-sun before the rain started last night at 9pm, according to the Norwegians at yr.no — I am sorry, it looks like rain all weekend.
But y’all jus’ keep on dumping those fossil fuel emissions and plastics into the climate and environment ... And that’s how these Blue Beard’s end it for all of us.
Where was I? This week, however, despite political purges and casual daily censorship, deadbeat vanity projects with roofs flapping and flying off down on the paved paradise at the beachfront, and everything dank and soggy everywhere as I scribble this, I am full of hope!
Yes, your disloyal, querulous, opinionated, silly, occasionally blue and forgetful scribe is hitting the road for the longest road trip of his-her-they-its life!
I am delighted to be joining the Eyabantwana Trust’s courageous pilgrimage from the northern border near Musina to Old Selbornian’s Club here.
So these 10 riders are each raising R10,000 to R15,000 for the trust to buy desperately needed painkiller drugs like morphine, decent antiseptic (not bath wash) and lines used when babies are so starved you can’t find their veins — and these good cycling souls also pay their own way on the ride.
Why does the social club of 90 or more of our city’s best people, Grandad’s Army, actually ride in support of the trust?
Because a paediatric doctor Dirk von Delft got on his fiets in 2009 and rode from Frere to Cape Town to raise money for items starting to be needed for children back in Slums.
Corruption was starting to eat into the democratic enamel of our society. Things were starting to fall apart.
His bosses back then, Prof Colin Lazarus and Prof Milind Chitnis, took a good look at this, and at how another amazing trust, Carte Blanche’s Making a Difference, had raised R20m for a paediatric theatre suite at Frere.
Prof Chitnis had also worked hard to have a paediatric theatre built at Cecilia Makiwane.
These two very dear men peered at each other, and Colin, being a cyclist, said: “We can do that too!”
And so Colin and tjoms, one being Gerald Berlyn, started “Grandad’s Army”, which set out taking and posting a few selfies along the way.
It has since grown into a little media partnership with their own columnist, Deloris Koan, in tow!
It’s going to be 16 days on the road, 12 of them cycling home, at about 100km a day. That is a lot of slow riding on a rather large motorcycle.
But all for one, one for all, I say! And who will be leading those riders? Prof Lazarus at the age of 80! Let me say that again: 80.
The partnership has put me in contact with the surgeons and that is where hope has sprung eternal, as we say in Slums.
This week, we published the dream of the deputy in the paediatric unit, Dr Yashoda Manickchund.
She wants to see our community building a 50-bed children’s hospital in East London.
I was so stunned at the concept that we ran a full page on her ideas on Wednesday.
I have never forgotten the sense of dread and horror evoked by our Daily Dispatch exclusive investigation into child poverty in the province in June 2021.
If ever the need for a public-private partnership to build such a hospital existed, it is right now, right here.
Our investigation revealed children sick, hurt, hungry and angry and grannies skipping meals themselves to feed the children they have been left to raise.
Three million children, we reported, were poor and close to starving (multidimensionally impoverished).
It was so horrendous and wrenching that our newsroom was suddenly piled high with food and clothes spontaneously delivered by members of the public who read our paper, ya know, the clever ones!
I was also impressed at the way Dr Manickchund handled the hoary old macadamia nut of health department failings, with candour but not rancour.
If we, the public, dive in and find the R50m needed for the project, rest assured, that money will remain in public hands and close to the doctors who need to make it work hardest and for an amazing cause.
I am often portrayed as dark, cynical, curmudgeon, but no, when presented with a beautiful child of a project, the offspring of a paediatric surgery movement which is itself a survivor of the 1994 daisy rush, I am hubris incarnate!
The trick is to understand how great projects get trodden on by the heeled boots of gangsters, tenderpreneurs, construction mafia, political demagogues, all the evil pantheons which have cannibalised our democracy.
The daisies need to grow up and be as resilient as our very own ultimate survivor, Umtiza listeriana. That tree is hard, thorny, beautiful, pragmatic and resilient.
Dr Manickchund, a Durban Girls High top student, has travelled far and wide in the medical world with Médecins Sans Frontières, and is well connected with paediatricians and their hospitals around the globe.
This antie is tough, compassionate and smart — and has support.
She is a trustee on the Eyabantwana Trust for the Children and they want your dough, no matter how small or large, but if you got some, make it large please.
I want to be alive when she, Prof Chitlin, staff, and friends of East London and the Eastern Cape, cut the ribbon.
Madonna paid for a 50-bed children’s hospital in Malawi. I would love to see a global star chip in here too — Beyoncé? Bruce Springsteen? Will Smith? Charlese Theron? Izzy Izard — she was hospitalised in Beacon Bay Life for dehydration while running 27 marathons for Madiba in 2006 — and she raised R30m.
With imagination and daring, these things can be done! And they make us feel good about the future we now know we need — and want. And it could be heaps of liberating fun.
I believe Eyabantwana, like the Boks, are in with a shot.
Donate at or transfer money to Eyabantwana — For the Children Trust, Nedbank, Beacon Bay, current account 1138181366.
DispatchLIVE
Eyabantwana, like the Boks, are in with a shot!
Cyclists’ courageous pilgrimage from northern border near Musina to Old Selbornian’s to raise much-needed funds for paediatric patients
Image: RANDELL ROSKRUGE
The raindrops were literally drying on my helmet visor when I spotted Buffalo City traffic cops setting up their ATM at the entrance to the Gonubie cement road.
I mean, they were emptying pockets metres from the circle leading off the old R102 Farmarama circle.
Google tells me they were one minute away from where Anthropogene, the climate monster, came and bit off chunks of bitumen and road metal barriers.
That circle had turned to cavernous gravel, but there were the good men and women of our traffic department raising money which would go directly into filling those potholes, and all the other scabrous kilometres of road in Gonubie itself!
There ends the fairy-tale folks.
I berated myself in my helmet as I passed some poor sucker in a Japanese fridge-on-wheels with a blown up tyre: “Don’t die in a BCM crater!”
It can feel impossible to find meaning out of this present hellscape envisioned and painted 540 years ago by Hieronymus Bosch.
But the sun is out and you had a precious 57 hours of sort-of-sun before the rain started last night at 9pm, according to the Norwegians at yr.no — I am sorry, it looks like rain all weekend.
But y’all jus’ keep on dumping those fossil fuel emissions and plastics into the climate and environment ... And that’s how these Blue Beard’s end it for all of us.
Where was I? This week, however, despite political purges and casual daily censorship, deadbeat vanity projects with roofs flapping and flying off down on the paved paradise at the beachfront, and everything dank and soggy everywhere as I scribble this, I am full of hope!
Yes, your disloyal, querulous, opinionated, silly, occasionally blue and forgetful scribe is hitting the road for the longest road trip of his-her-they-its life!
I am delighted to be joining the Eyabantwana Trust’s courageous pilgrimage from the northern border near Musina to Old Selbornian’s Club here.
So these 10 riders are each raising R10,000 to R15,000 for the trust to buy desperately needed painkiller drugs like morphine, decent antiseptic (not bath wash) and lines used when babies are so starved you can’t find their veins — and these good cycling souls also pay their own way on the ride.
Why does the social club of 90 or more of our city’s best people, Grandad’s Army, actually ride in support of the trust?
Because a paediatric doctor Dirk von Delft got on his fiets in 2009 and rode from Frere to Cape Town to raise money for items starting to be needed for children back in Slums.
Corruption was starting to eat into the democratic enamel of our society. Things were starting to fall apart.
His bosses back then, Prof Colin Lazarus and Prof Milind Chitnis, took a good look at this, and at how another amazing trust, Carte Blanche’s Making a Difference, had raised R20m for a paediatric theatre suite at Frere.
Prof Chitnis had also worked hard to have a paediatric theatre built at Cecilia Makiwane.
These two very dear men peered at each other, and Colin, being a cyclist, said: “We can do that too!”
And so Colin and tjoms, one being Gerald Berlyn, started “Grandad’s Army”, which set out taking and posting a few selfies along the way.
It has since grown into a little media partnership with their own columnist, Deloris Koan, in tow!
It’s going to be 16 days on the road, 12 of them cycling home, at about 100km a day. That is a lot of slow riding on a rather large motorcycle.
But all for one, one for all, I say! And who will be leading those riders? Prof Lazarus at the age of 80! Let me say that again: 80.
The partnership has put me in contact with the surgeons and that is where hope has sprung eternal, as we say in Slums.
This week, we published the dream of the deputy in the paediatric unit, Dr Yashoda Manickchund.
She wants to see our community building a 50-bed children’s hospital in East London.
I was so stunned at the concept that we ran a full page on her ideas on Wednesday.
I have never forgotten the sense of dread and horror evoked by our Daily Dispatch exclusive investigation into child poverty in the province in June 2021.
If ever the need for a public-private partnership to build such a hospital existed, it is right now, right here.
Our investigation revealed children sick, hurt, hungry and angry and grannies skipping meals themselves to feed the children they have been left to raise.
Three million children, we reported, were poor and close to starving (multidimensionally impoverished).
It was so horrendous and wrenching that our newsroom was suddenly piled high with food and clothes spontaneously delivered by members of the public who read our paper, ya know, the clever ones!
I was also impressed at the way Dr Manickchund handled the hoary old macadamia nut of health department failings, with candour but not rancour.
If we, the public, dive in and find the R50m needed for the project, rest assured, that money will remain in public hands and close to the doctors who need to make it work hardest and for an amazing cause.
I am often portrayed as dark, cynical, curmudgeon, but no, when presented with a beautiful child of a project, the offspring of a paediatric surgery movement which is itself a survivor of the 1994 daisy rush, I am hubris incarnate!
The trick is to understand how great projects get trodden on by the heeled boots of gangsters, tenderpreneurs, construction mafia, political demagogues, all the evil pantheons which have cannibalised our democracy.
The daisies need to grow up and be as resilient as our very own ultimate survivor, Umtiza listeriana. That tree is hard, thorny, beautiful, pragmatic and resilient.
Dr Manickchund, a Durban Girls High top student, has travelled far and wide in the medical world with Médecins Sans Frontières, and is well connected with paediatricians and their hospitals around the globe.
This antie is tough, compassionate and smart — and has support.
She is a trustee on the Eyabantwana Trust for the Children and they want your dough, no matter how small or large, but if you got some, make it large please.
I want to be alive when she, Prof Chitlin, staff, and friends of East London and the Eastern Cape, cut the ribbon.
Madonna paid for a 50-bed children’s hospital in Malawi. I would love to see a global star chip in here too — Beyoncé? Bruce Springsteen? Will Smith? Charlese Theron? Izzy Izard — she was hospitalised in Beacon Bay Life for dehydration while running 27 marathons for Madiba in 2006 — and she raised R30m.
With imagination and daring, these things can be done! And they make us feel good about the future we now know we need — and want. And it could be heaps of liberating fun.
I believe Eyabantwana, like the Boks, are in with a shot.
Donate at or transfer money to Eyabantwana — For the Children Trust, Nedbank, Beacon Bay, current account 1138181366.
DispatchLIVE
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