HUNGRY HOMES: At the heart of the home, gogo Toti goes without so grandchildren can eat

Gogo Thozama Toti (68) of Emaxelegwini near Ngcobo, Eastern Cape, routinely skips meals so her grandchildren can eat. Noodles for the kids, hunger for the adults in her three-roomed mud home.

Exploring the impossible trade-offs families make to put food on the table, and the resilience keeping them afloat in backyard gardens to food stokvels. In this series, community journalists enter vulnerable homes to reveal how families fight hunger.

On a chilly weekday morning, gogo Thozama Toti sits next to a stove, watching her granddaughter prepare a meal of noodles.

Another grandchild waits patiently on a bed inside the dilapidated three-roomed mud house in Emaxelegwini informal settlement near Ngcobo in the Eastern Cape.

The 68-year-old grandmother already knows the noodles will not be enough food for everyone.

Gogo Toti shares her home with her five adult children and six grandchildren.

Living with arthritis, she says life has been a struggle since moving to the settlement from her village in 2002, about 10km away, in search of work.

She says she found employment as a domestic worker and worked until 2021 at the age of 63, before arthritis forced her to stop working.

Today, all five of her adult children, aged between 31 and 45, and her three oldest grandchildren, aged between 18 and 23, are unemployed.

The family is mainly dependent on gogo Toti’s old-age grant of R2,400, and she says they receive child support grants for three of her youngest grandchildren, aged between three and ten, of R560 each.

“The grandchildren need to eat and also have clothes on their backs, so their grant money goes to those needs,” she says.

Gogo Toti says she has to borrow money from family or friends every month to buy food.

“On a monthly basis, I spend R2,000 on groceries and the rest goes to credit because during the month I have to borrow money for food,” she says.

“Meat is a luxury nowadays because we have to prioritise samp, mealie meal and other essentials. For meat, we buy the cheaper soup packs, which don’t even last a month.”