Widening the scope of Baby Safe

A few of us spent this morning digging around in the rubbish on the outer edge of Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township. After the spate of baby murders that hit the press recently, as well as a growing sense that our work is to have an impact beyond the two communities where it’s been focussed, we’ve begun exploring opportunities in other communities.

It’s a strange feeling looking through bags of rubbish for baby bodies. You feel totally conflicted. On the one hand, finding a dead baby would be awful: it’s one of the worst things you can imagine, and you don’t know how you might react. On the other, we want to figure out where the problem is at its most concentrated. We want to find the bodies, so that we can fight this problem.

This time we didn’t find any bodies, but we made a lot of contacts with the city workers, who collect rubbish in the township.