Bethlehem marches against tobacco



BETHLEHEM. – On World No Tobacco Day members from the Department of Health (DOH) in the Thabo Mofutsanyana district marched through the streets wearing T-shirts with the message “smoking is addictive, don’t start” and shouted “Down with smoking! Down!”
“We are tired of seeing our young brothers and sisters on the street corners smoking cigarettes and weed. I did not go to work today, instead I joined the march to spread the important message of saying no to smoking,” said Sellwane Mofokeng, a teacher from Bohlokong Primary School.
Many people in the community were not aware of World No Tobacco Day until they saw the march. “This is a big day, in the past this issue didn’t receive a lot of attention. Today people saw us marching with our posters and that made them curious to know the purpose of the day,” said Carine Wagenaar, a social worker at the Bethlehem Child and Family Welfare.
Drug abuse is one of the challenges faced by the Bethlehem community, especially in young people and older men, says SAPS Constable Mojalefa Malakoane, who believes the community needs to be educated on matters such as smoking.
“Education is important and being part of the march I feel I have contributed to the knowledge of my community. Smoking is bad for your health and is addictive. It often also it leads the use of other drug,” said Malakoane.
Learners from LK Ntlabathi and Motshepuwa School, Thembi Miya, Constance Mokoena and Ntaoleng Tshotetsi, told OurHealth that they enjoyed the march and learnt a lot about the illnesses that can be caused by smoking tobacco. “I feel good because we managed to gather the kids and give them information, I hope they use the information. I hope the community also understood why we had the march.”
“The day was a success, as a collective we made the message come out stronger,” said Dr Sarieta Wentzel, local area manager at the Bethlehem DOH.
Author
-
Selloane Molakeng is an OurHealth Citizen Journalist reporting from the Free State's Xhariep Health District.
View all posts
Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Bethlehem marches against tobacco
by Selloane Molakeng, Health-e News
June 11, 2013