Equipment bought with a huge donation, mostly from an overseas Rotary club, will help a Grahamstown tuberculosis treatment centre to cope with its high cooking and cleaning demands.
Equipment bought with a huge donation, mostly from an overseas Rotary club, will help a Grahamstown tuberculosis treatment centre to cope with its high cooking and cleaning demands.
The seed of generosity was sown in 2007 by Grahamstown Rotarian Jurg Richner while on holiday at the Rotary Club of Aarau, Switzerland, and recently it finally bore fruit for the Temba Santa TB Hospital.
Grahamstown Rotary Club Sunset handed over kitchen and laundry equipment to the TB hospital in A Street, Joza. Don Hendry, past president of Grahamstown Rotary and the man in charge of the matching grants, said that a large amount of the donation came from the Rotary foundation in Chicago, and that local Rotary contributed R1 000 to the total amount of R90 000.
The equipment donated was to the value of R80 000 and included an industrial washing machine, stove and dish washing machine. The rest of the money is going to be used for installing the new equipment, Hendry said. Hospital manager, Willem Human, told Grocott's Mail, "the donation has come at a good time because our equipment is old, and the money we got from the Department of Health to replace them can now be spent on other equipment."
Jubilant hospital staff expressed their gratitude for the new equipment. "I'm very happy with these gifts, as our machines kept on breaking because they are normal household machines, and this is an industrial one," said the hospital's laundry supervisor Daniswa Mene. "This is also going to help make our work easier."
Kitchen supervisor Nomthandazo Jawuka said, "I'm also happy about the stove, because the one we used would burn only on one side and then we would be late with the patients' meals." She also said that her job would be easier thanks to the donations, and was particularly pleased to have a dish washing machine now.
