A Kirstenhof man will tackle the 109km Cape Town Cycle Tour this Sunday for charity and in memory of a life-long friend who died of a heart attack six years ago while training for the race.
Mark Anderson met Vernon Wood when they played rugby together at UCT more than three decades ago.
Mr Anderson went on to become a school teacher and later worked as a pension fund consultant while Mr Wood would become the principal of Bergvliet High and later Bishops Diocesan College.
“We became friends and stayed friends till he passed away. I was also a school teacher for a short while and he stayed in education his whole life. We started off as educators. Strangely by coincidence, he started at Queen’s College in Queenstown, Eastern Cape, which is the school that I went to when I was a kid. He then moved from there to Muizenberg and then to Bergvliet High, where he became headmaster.”
Mr Wood collapsed from a heart attack and died while training for the Cycle Tour on a tandem bike in 2018.
His friend remembers him as a down-to-earth, humble man with a passion for education and wanting to make a difference.
Mr Wood was one of the founding directors of the LifeMatters Foundation, a non-profit organisation that provides academic and other support to disadvantaged and at-risk primary school pupils in the southern suburbs.
Sunday’s race will be Mr Anderson’s 22nd Cycle Tour. For the past six, he has worn a T-shirt with a photograph of Mr Wood to remember him and promote LifeMatters. This year is the first time he is racing to raise funds for the organisation and he has set up a givengain page.
“LifeMatters is such an amazing organisation and hence my desire to raise money for it. Obviously non-profits all struggle financially; they are effectively dependent on people because people make the difference. LifeMatters has a handful of paid staff and a large number of volunteers. The programme runs mainly on volunteers.”
Mr Anderson said he and his wife, Linda, do volunteer work for LifeMatters, and on Thursday mornings, they visit Sullivan Primary School in Steenberg to help children read using the Shine Literacy programme, which offers support with reading and writing to Grade 2s and 3s.
“The programme helps the school teachers with big classes struggling to give individual attention. The school teacher will identify the really weak learners; they get sent out to the LifeMatters classroom for a period. It is only once a week, but you get to know the kids and develop a relationship with them. It is just lovely to see them develop and grow in confidence as they get more focused attention that they don’t get in the big classrooms,” Mr Anderson said.
“The organisation can obviously do better (financially), but I think Vernon would be super proud because it has grown in leaps and bounds. He would be smiling from heaven to see how things have continued.”
LifeMatters literacy programme coordinator Kirsty Nortje described Mr Wood as a “respected and admired educator” who cared about helping the less fortunate, and she said all the money raised by Mr Anderson would go directly to helping pupils helped by LifeMatters.
Email admin@lifemattersfoundation.org or call 021 712 0383If you would like to volunteer to help with the LifeMatters literacy and numeracy programmes.
