August News

Well we have certainly been battening down the hatches this month. The storms that have been blowing through here have been rather wild. We’ve had trees blowing down all over the property (thankfully not near buildings or people) and anything that has not been tied down has been found in a foreign place. Perhaps the biggest casualty on the farm has been a pre-fabricated shed, fondly known as The Cabin. We use it to store lots of bits and bobs and, though it has never been water-tight, it has always been good for some kind of storage……Not so now! After the wind and rain this weekend the poor old cabin is as flat as a pancake and the roof is nowhere to be seen! Thankfully Mel and her friend as well as two of our fabulously multi-talented House Moms, were on hand to move the items quickly out of the wet weather. Those girls do have some muscles on them! Now it’s down to the maintenance team to sort out somewhere to store all the homeless items and clear up the mess!

We are having a giggle amongst the team because the cabin episode happened the night that Tim and Maz, our trusty Project Managers, left for a six week, much needed holiday! Let’s hope by the time they return we have managed to keep everything together. We have done it before so we can do it again!! Please keep us in your prayers!

Children’s Unit
With all the wintry weather the children and House Moms have been keeping safely tucked indoors a lot of the time but we are not short of news as ever!

We are most excited to welcome a new little one to the Village of Hope family. As with many of the children here, they all have their story to tell, but we are just happy that we can offer some relief and some loving care whilst he is with us. Along with a new child we have also been able to receive Marlise, a social work student from the HAN university in Holland. Marlise is going to be with us for a year and is already getting stuck in!

As well as a new child and new student we also have a lovely shiny new people carrier! Thanks to a lot of hard work and fundraising we finally had enough money to buy a Hyundai H1. It is not brand new but it is the newest vehicle we have ever been able to purchase and will be a lot more reliable than the old VW combi we had previously. We are doing our best to keep it looking new for as long as possible. The maintenance team has created an nice dry area for us to park it so it is less likely to get sandy and muddy with all the bad weather we have been having. The kids use it to go to school each day and we are able to use it for our sports clubs and Rainbow Smiles on Fridays.

Sports Outreach and Community Work
We’ve tried to keep sports clubs as regular as possible despite the weather. Now that we have reliable mentors it allows us to have more flexibility because if the weather is bad they can choose to hold their particular clubs on drier days whereas in times gone by we just didn’t have the capacity to be so flexible.

We also now have our next Dutch students. Yorram and Anna are fantastic and already proving their dedication to our cause by going beyond their brief. They even helped with babysitting in the Children’s Unit whilst we held a staff meeting – and those of you who have volunteered before and helped with that know what kind of dedication that is! It is so exciting to see the relationships developing between us and the HAN university and we know that every student we receive from them is an asset to us.

We are also very excited to be able to re-start our club in the Rooidakke area. We previously had to suspend it due to lack of resources but now we have been able to employ one of our mentors part-time via funding from a Government works programme. This means that he, along with Yorram’s assistance will be running the club and taking on some other duties within the sports outreach team.

Other News
Volunteers:
It has been very quiet on the volunteer front this month. Although that has meant more work for our core team it has also been a good time to regroup. By this time next month we will have welcomed three new volunteers. Two from the USA and one from Holland, so things don’t stay quiet for long and we will be happy for the extra hands - especially with our leaders being away.

Cycle To The Sea:
In a few short days a team of able, willing but crazy people are going to be excitedly donning their lycra and cycling over 100 miles to raise money for us. Please support them in their efforts as this is no mean feat and all the money they raise will come directly to us and the work that we are doing. You can sponsor them online here: www.justgiving.com/CycleToTheSea2012

How You Can Help
We are never short of ideas on how you can help us out!!!!
• Become a regular monthly giver - Regular givers are like gold dust to us!!!
• Fundraise – Commit to shave your head, host a quiz night, do a sporting event!!!!! – The possibilities are endless and can raise R10000s with enough enthusiasm!
• Pray – need we say more?!

For more information contact us fundraiser@thembalitsha.org.za

Volunteering
We rely heavily on committed volunteers to do the stuff here in South Africa. It can be a fantastic way to give (and receive!) However, we do have some criteria you have to meet in order to apply. For more information on volunteering for Thembalitsha please check out our website or email us at volunteer@thembalitsha.org.za.

Also, please do NOT book ANY flights before your application form has been accepted. Thank you!

Up And Coming Events
For further details check out our Facebook page:
www.facebook.com/thembalitshafoundation

a new child and new student

it's always exciting for our house moms to
welcome little ones into our care

this seems to be a season of new things, today we bring you the exciting news that we have been able to provide a new home to a little boy (around 16 months old) with a very complex home situation. unfortunately his home (tin shack) was burnt down with a fatality and the young mom is unable to cope with everything during this trying time.....it is wonderful to be able to provide a place of safety for this child whilst his family situation is sorted by our local social workers.

marlise our new social work student

speaking of social workers we are pleased to tell you of our most recent dutch student from the HAN university who will be with us for 10 months as we host her as a placement for her social work studies. the help and support that we receive from these students is invaluable and we look forward to the work that marlise will be providing the children who stay with us at the village of hope and also those who attend our rainbow smiles HIV support group.

new sport support from the HAN students

new sports students with the kids from
site view and snake park sports club

over the last few years we have been blessed with a plethora of sports students who have been placed with us at the village of hope sports outreach project, it has been my honor to be the 'practical supervisor' for these students from the HAN university in nijmegen, holland, and we have not only been able to continue but also expand and extend our sports outreach, via better planning schedules and documentation, thus ensuring that the project continues long after the dutch students have returned home. this has been due to the work that we have developed for our sports mentors (peer educators) and this is something that the new students will continue to work towards.

this afternoon we held our first sports outreach with the new students, yoram and anna, who will be working with us for the next five months. the field was packed with children, some of them much too young to be able to understand the topic for the day, which was all based around planning for the future and how being prepared is an important lifeskill to learn, however the 24 boys and 20 girls aged 9-15 who attended the club had a wonderful afternoon.

the photo was taken right at the end of the session when at least half of the children, and our wonderful care worker, lindi, from thembacare who comes to help run the netball with the xhosa speaking girls, had gone home. however i hope you can see the joy on the faces of the children that we work with on a monday afternoon from the site view and snake park areas of the townships here in grabouw. the photo also shows themba, standing to the top left of the photo, who is our peer educator for that club....unfortunately michael (our other mentor) was late home from school and could make it today!

tomorrow we will be working in iraq with our further clubs taking place in rooidakke, waterworks, and the two farms on wednesday and thursday afternoons. please keep an eye out for the future news of the sports outreach we do in grabouw.

new vehicle of hope!

mommy maz bringing the kids home from school
in the new H1.......

over the last few months we have been in desperate need of a better larger vehicle to enable us to transport our children, both those who live with us at the village of hope and the children in the community, especially those who we pick up for our weekly rainbow smiles support group and our sports mentors as we complete our sports clubs at the local farms.

rainbow smiles kids with the new van this afternoon.

our 12 year old VW kombi had been giving us problems for quite a while and with it's temperamental backwards gear box and other quirks it proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

we need to thank both amanda and karlien who completed their ride from the village of hope to the lighthouse at cape agullas, our friends in england via the donations made to thembalitshauk, our dutch friends and the guys at Hyundai in somerset west that we are pleased to announce that we are now the proud owners of a H1, 9 seater vehicle, which is a real God send.

the children are really happy to be traveling to school in style, and everybody seems to want to do the school run now.

we welcome back mel kidd this weekend and we hope that she will be able to learn to drive a manual gearbox and she can join in the fun as well!

another story of new hope

mommy maz and nettie signing to discharge docs
with the little girls father!

we had quite an eventful friday afternoon, some of which i will update you on now and some we hope to bring you news of later, but just to say that we really saw the work that the team at the village of hope children's unit, ably lead by mommy maz, come into it's own.

the new hope story (for those who don't know 'thembalitsha' means 'new hope' in the local xhosa language) is that we were able to successfully discharge our 26th child into the care of her father who will be reuniting her with his family in the eastern cape (traditional xhosa tribal homelands around 1000kms from cape town).

this precious little 2 and a half year old girl had been in our care for around 9 months and we had been busy with the local social workers and those in the eastern cape to try to find a solution for her to return home, which is never a easy task, but we thank God for his amazing promises towards us and to the children we care for.

saying goodbye to a child is always a bitter sweet time, on one hand we are so pleased to have provided the secure home, the love and care for the child and we are pleaded to have had some positive input into the next steps of these little ones lives but we do have to trust that all the work that has been done with the family will pay off and we have to place them into their hands with confidence that they will take on the things that we have taught them prior to the discharge....which is never easy!

just another (women's) day

flowers and kids trying to get in the photo

today we celebrated women's day here in south africa, it was a public holiday, even for the men and from what i saw it was mostly the women who were doing any work today....at least in the informal settlements around grabouw. i suppose it could have had something to do with the weather but it would seem that today wasn't a day to sit around and make the most of their day off, no it was a day to do all those chores that you don't normally get round to during the week.

maz bought flowers for each of our house mom's and for one of them, who is nearly thirty, this was the first time, yes you read it right, the first time that anyone had bought her flowers...she was so made up.

for our house mom's (and maz) it was business as usual in the children's unit, although maz did manage to get an hour off to go have a coffee with a friend mid morning....she has only just got home and is now busy preparing my evening meal and changing our bed as she managed to do some washing today as well....i can see why they celebrate women with a special day here in south africa.


i hope you like a few of the photos that i took today.....

helping with some electric homework!

one of our sports mentors (rasta) with a
well worn soccer ball...anyone willing to help?

what started out as a simple visit to our sports mentors to inform them that the rain had washed out any chance of running our sports outreach in the iraq/zwelitsha informal settlement this afternoon turned into an opportunity to help two young school girls with their homework.

after chatting with the guys around a very warm wood fire about the need for some more footballs to be donated for the sports outreach over a cup of ricoffe i was asked to take their sister and a friend to the local library to enable them to do their homework, when enquiring as to what their homework was about i was told that they needed to find out about electricity.....some what ironic that the tin shack that they live in doesn't have access to electricity, or basic sanitation for that matter, but i thought that it could be an opportunity for me to take them to visit the very local, and even more ironic, water turbine powered electricity plant which lies around 2kms from their home.

chilling round an indoor fire with coffee

the girls enjoying a coffee at the visitor centre!

so we made the short trip to the palmiet dam power station, run by eskom, the same company who have completed our recent upgrades at the village of hope, and after a few minutes we made ourselves welcome into their 1st world visitor centre where the girls were presented with a pack of glossy brochures informing them about how electric is made.

back home with their info packs to help with their homework

we were also shown a short video giving some depth to the setting up of such a power station in one of the worlds 6 floral kingdoms, the cape fynbos, under the kogelberg biosphere....all this was a little overwhelming to the two girls who had only asked for a lift to the library where they would have had to scan books and paid for photocopies of info which really was on their (and their school mates) doorsteps, after a cup of coffee at the centre we returned to their tin shack, to a warm fire but alas no electricity for them to enjoy!

sometimes one has to just connect a few dots to make the day for people, if only we would take the time to do this (even me sitting here in south africa, a missionary to this land) for our fellow man.

electric upgrade!

tim berger enjoying playing!

most of our post are centered around the work we do with the children in our unit or with those we work with in the local community, however today's news is a little more mundane but none the less important as we plan for the future of the village of hope.

men who know what they are doing with
high voltage electrics

i'm no electrician so you will have to bear with the limited amount of detail in this post but basically yesterday we had the completion of the first phase of our electrical upgrade, which included the whole of the supply from ESKOM (our electricity supplier) who increased our current 80amps up to 150amps, we also had to install a new thicker cable for the new power to come through, as well as a large distribution box with new fuse board.....

...most of that will have passed you by, as it did me, but what this means is that firstly tim berger got chance to play with some slightly heavier plant which included a trencher and overall it means that we are now able to connect up the ukuqala II building and plan for the next phase of building work and internal changes to increase the amount of children we can take into our unit.

all in all it meant that we were inundated with men in high vis jackets (well maybe not this is africa after all!), with some very heavy duty footwear to protect them from any danger, plus a large number of vehicles including a crane to install the new equipment.

sorry for that boring post, but news is news!