sight provided for those in need!

the girl with her new glasses (side photo to protect her identity!

sometimes it is easy to take things for granted, such as our health, health care systems and just the ease to buy what we need!, we hope the story below will highlight the struggles that many of the children we work with face each and everyday. 

a couple of weeks ago during our Rainbow Smiles HIV Support group one of the girls approached emma, and asked if she could talk to her, it seemed to take all of her courage to tell her that she needed glasses and that her mother could not afford them, she went on to say that she is finding it difficult to do her school work without them. 

after undertaking a home visit we found out that this little girl doesn't actually live with her biological mother but her aunt, uncle and 3 cousins in a small home and that following the death of her parents they do not receive any extra money to help support them with her care, the glasses would cost R250 (£15). 

this initial interaction all took place on a friday afternoon, the very afternoon on which emma was going away on a well earned holiday, as you can imagine this broke emma's heart and challenged the very fact that that this young girl could not afford a pair of glasses, that are so essential and without them the affect on her health, education and future, and the holiday was a luxury and would not have detrimental affects on her future if she did not go.

these are some of the struggles we face on a daily basis living in a place that has completely different worlds right next door to each other. emma was able to express my heartache over facebook and emma had an amazing response, so many people offered to donate to buy a pair of glasses we have received donations of up to £80! there were also so many messages of encouragement from many people around the world encouraging the work we are doing and it is really amazing for us as a team to be able to hear those messages and it spurs us on a bit more to continue doing what we are doing. 

last week emma was able to take the girl down to the day hospital to buy the glasses, but that didn't go as smoothly as first anticipated and after waiting a long time they told us we needed to go to the provincial hospital as her eyes are very bad! as they started to make their way to book an ambulance they realised they had given the wrong folder!! good job they noticed and after going back and queering this they were finally told that they had lost her notes...!, this isn't the first time this has happened and thank God we were around to rectify the problem, we do appreciate all the work that the local hospital do and the fact that they have so many patients with complex cases but really! after some discussions they were able to see her again right there and then and redid the eye test, confirming once again that she needed to wear glasses. 

the young girl took great joy in trying on all the different frames and picked a pair she liked and we paid for the glasses. this morning we went to pick up the glasses, the day hospital was bursting with people at 7.30am but luckily all we needed to do was pick up the glasses, the young girl was very excited and seemed very pleased with her new glasses and it was a pleasure to watch this dear girl as she received an amazing gift she so desperately needs. 

unfortunately though this is just one case out of many, we would love to be able to help everyone and its difficult knowing that we are unable to do so but we continue to trust God and know what may seem impossible for us is certainly not impossible for God, we continue to be his hands and feet and pray he will put is in the places and with the people he wants us to be.  

thank you to everyone who donated, it was amazing to feel so supported by so many people, please continue to pray for the children in our Rainbow Smiles group and the children in the community whose lives are so complex.

February News

These last two months have been packed with excitement and different things going on!

Children’s Unit
In December we said goodbye to four of our little ones, which was very bittersweet, as we know it is best for them to be with their families or in a more permanent placement but as we have watched them grow and develop everyday it is easy to become attached! However God has entrusted these little ones in our care for a period of time and when that time ends we have to let go and continue to trust God that he will care for them.

Two of our little ones moved so the adoption process could be started. For our three-year-old boy, whose mother died in November, he was placed with his maternal aunt and uncle who already cared for his 13-year-old brother. They had also visited regularly and started to build a relationship with him which was a positive! He is now living with them under a foster care order and they have said they would like to adopt him. We see him regularly at the local pre-school and he seems very settled! Unfortunately the story for our two year old boy was not as successful. His mum had worked really hard undertaking everything required of her to enable her son to come back but due to her working on a farm the little boy was going to be discharged to his grandmother who would care for him whilst she was at work. All the necessary assessments were undertaken, he went home for Christmas but unfortunately, just after Christmas, his grandmother felt that she could not cope with him and her own children particularly around the paraffin stove. Therefore he ended up coming back to the Village of Hope just after Christmas. Although Plan A has not worked it was good that he was able to return to us so we can continue to work with the family and look at permanency for this little one.

As well as all the discharges we had a new admission, a little six-week-old baby whose mother had died shortly after giving birth and needed a place to stay until a suitable home placement can be made. It has been lovely taking care of such a small baby again.

Amongst all these goings on we also managed to have a Christmas party for all our current and past children with their families. The place was filled with laughter and singing and it was great to see so many children in the unit. It really gave us a taste of what it may look like if we fill all our beds!

First steps into school!

Despite the Christmas period being over, things have not slowed down and it has been busy, busy as usual! Just after Christmas our new baby boy was taken to hospital as he was unwell and stayed for a further 5 days. He was given intravenous  antibiotics and came back to us healthy but this meant daily runs to Caledon hospital and extra staff to stay with him day and night. January has also seen the start of the new school term and our three-year-old little girl with cerebral palsy had her first day! It was pretty incredible seeing her excited and keen to start school, practically running with her walking frame through the gates. Despite being behind in her speech and having a physical disability she is attending a mainstream school.  This little girl is filled with determination and courage, she is strong and focused and manages to keep with the other children and I think we can all learn something from her attitude! We are so proud of how far she has come! Since starting school her speech has improved and her ability to problem solve is coming on leaps and bounds! God is doing amazing work in this precious girl both emotionally and physically!

Unfortunately despite being registered as a partial care facility since September we are still struggling with getting children placed in temporary safe care at VOH. This is extremely frustrating as it appears to have been an on-going battle for a number of years now! It is frustrating when we have 6 beds available. We know how much need there is for these beds and that children at risk may remain in bad situations due to the social workers having no where else to place the children. We have met with the local social service agencies to try and join together in presenting a united front to the magistrate. However this has further highlighted the issue that we need to be registered as a child and youth care centre.


Sports

With schools here in Grabouw breaking up for summer in early December, and most of our children leaving the area to go back to the Eastern Cape for the holidays, sports clubs were strangely quiet over the December period. Though it would have been very easy for our mentors to decide they didn’t want to continue sports over this time, as always they have shown an incredible level of dedication to the programme. As a result, we continued going to sports clubs each week, taking a few weeks off from our normal set-up and instead just playing matches and hanging out with the kids. In a lot of ways, though we missed the busy routine of our normal clubs, actually the ‘quiet’ was rewarding too!

Some of our wonderful sports mentors receiving school
equipment

We are constantly aware of how much our mentors do for us and our sports programme, even though many of them have extremely complicated home lives. Though many of us would take being able to buy things like uniform and stationery for the start of the new school term for granted, actually for our mentors and so many others in the community, it all costs money that they simply don’t have. Thanks to the generosity of some recent volunteers here at Village of Hope, each of our mentors was given a bag with all the essentials for their start back to school. It was humbling to see how, for us, ‘little’ things like a pad of paper and some pencils brought such joy. We were also able to help some of our mentors out with buying them the school uniform that they so desperately need.

As a Christmas present and another ‘thank you!’ for all that they do, we took all the mentors on a trip to watch Bafana Bafana take on Nigeria in Cape Town in the recent African Nations Championships. Even though South Africa lost 3-1 on the night, with two red cards, two penalties, and a lot of

action, it was a great evening and a treat for our guys and girls to see their heroes in action on the big stage.

With schools being back in session, numbers at our clubs are slowly starting to pick up with more children finding out about the programme and old faces returning. We are also glad to welcome back Jasper, a returning HAN student who will be helping to co-ordinate the sports program over the coming months, including writing a new sports programme as we come to the end of our current 16 weeks of content.  


Rainbow Smiles

Our Rainbow Smiles group is continuing well. We had a great end to the year with a trip to the beach which the children loved! We have recently found out that some of the children who attend Rainbow Smiles do not know that they are HIV positive. This is a difficult scenario when they are attending the club expressly because of their positive status! As a result it has highlighted an area we need to resolve and we are currently undertaking more work with the families to help us identify what their needs are and how we can best support. One of the young girls came to us the other day and told us her mother could not afford to buy the glasses she desperately needs. Without something as simple as reading glasses her education and future could be affected. From visiting the family to see if we could support them, we were able to identify that the family were not receiving any child care grants and needed support in applying for these to help financially provide for the family. It is sometimes a frustration for us seeing so much need and not being able to help everyone in the community but we have to keep remembering that by helping those we have a relationship with it can make a massive difference in their lives.

Other News:
Cycling SAVE THE DATE:
Our annual cycle in the UK is being planned for Saturday 14th June. Suitable for all ages and based around Aylesbury. Keep your eyes peeled on our facebook page for more details.

Dog Days Are Over:
Those of you who have visited us in the past will have met our lovely lab, Wag n bietjie. We inherited him when we acquired Village of Hope. Sadly he passed away this week. The end of an era!

Volunteers:
We are very pleased to have welcomed Jasper back to the fold. Jasper was on placement with us from the HAN university a couple of years ago and helped out with the sports. He has returned to serve for a further three months which is fantastic especially when we are going to have to say goodbye to the lovely Shana Cox who has served us so selflessly for the last 6 months as our sports intern. We are going to miss you Shana!

Gundi, the mother of one of the Stuttgart students who helped to build some of the new buildings on Village of Hope, has also arrived to serve for a couple of months. She is great with little kids and is assisting our little three-year-old girl in adjusting to preschool. We are so impressed with Gundi who is brave enough to come here with English as her second language!


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!

thankful for our new entrance...

revamped lawn area

car parking

car park area

from car park to reception

whatever the content of this post it would be hard to follow on from our last blog post as the things that we shared still affect us on a daily basis, with further news of sports mentors with growing social problems, our rainbow smiles children who are opening up to us with difficult life stories, the mothers of our children who are suffering in various different ways, the list goes on and on, therefore this post might seem a little trivial in comparison, however we are keen to show off the new plants that we have been blessed with and we want to thank those who gave us a donation which has enabled us to transform the entrance areas to our facility.

view to the front gate from reception door

for those of you who have visited our amazing village of hope project during the last few years i am sure you will be surprised by the changes that have taken place, these might seem very superficial, but for us this bears out the call upon the project to do all things well, be that supporting the children who live with us in the new children's unit or delivering a great and consistent sports outreach programme to creating some amazing space for our volunteers to stay or creating an entrance to the property that looks fantastic and speaks of God's abundance towards us.

have a look at the photos, which i deliberately took on a warm but cloudy day so as not to make those in the northern hemisphere too jealous of our delightful summer!, and maybe next year we could open our doors and take part in the elgin open gardens which is quite famous around our parts!?

called to be his hands and feet.....

there are some days, and even some weeks, when you feel so overwhelmed by the plight of literally thousands of people who live in our town that you really do wonder what difference we are really making in the grand scheme of things.

I have had many such days since first visiting grabouw back in 2006 and even more since our move out to set up the village of hope in october 2008. there aren't many times when I actually get time to compile my thoughts however looking back through this blog I did managed to capture the thoughts of one of those days in may 2012, have a read of that post by clicking on this link, and today was another one of those days and I will try to put into words the type of day it was.

the day started in pretty much the same way as normal weekdays, we all met together at 8.15am at our team meeting where we discussed the things that we were involved in from yesterday and prepared ourselves for the day ahead, asking God to guide us as we complete the jobs that needed to be done to ensure we run a productive and well governed project, however it wasn't until around 3pm that I ventured out into the community to pick up one of our sports mentors who was going to help shana run our netball outreach in the iraq informal settlement....and that's when stuff started to impact me.

after the morning meeting most days I seem to be running from one meeting to another, completing a report for some funder or another or replying to an urgent email from a colleague who needs answers to a question, however this afternoon as I dropped the mentor at the club in one of the poorest communities we work in I stopped to talk to a lady who had called my name.

after getting out of the car, making sure I didn't step in anything untoward! and having a quick chat with the xhosa lady who had called to me I noticed a young girl sitting in the doorway of her house, a small tin shack, around 3 meters square with no water or electricity, she seemed to be caring for a small child and it wasn't till I approached her that I noticed a dilapidated wheelchair standing outside of the home.

it turns out that this young girl is 13 years old and can't walk, she seemed bright enough in herself but to see her shuffling around on the mud floor of her home compelled me to pray for her, asking God to restore all that was broken in her life, not only her physical condition but anything that was causing her to miss out on the life that God had originally had planned for her.

looking back at this interaction I know that this young girl was one of many who I passed today, but it was only when I stopped and took some time to understand her life, showed the love that Jesus calls us to show towards our neighbours that I was able to be the hands and feet of Jesus to her this afternoon.

I didn't have all the answers but within 10 minutes I managed to make a phone call to a local school who takes in children with physical problems (I am hopeful that this will be one of the answers to our prayers) but the best part was that I was able to pray with her and ask God our father to restore her and I just spent time sitting with her, engaging with her, even though we couldn't speak the same language.

its only when reflecting on what impacted me most that I realise that my (or even your) calling isn't to save the whole world, country, province or town, its literally to be the hands and feet of Jesus, but what does that mean I hear you ask?

well Jesus was both fully human and full God, here on earth he was only able to impact communities one or two people at a time (OK I know he feed both 5,000 and 4,000 people with some loaves and fishes but most of his ministry was to individuals) and that's what I was able to do today.

it was still a hard day, the sights, sounds and smells that surround us impact us in ways that you can never know unless you have visited but as I sit here typing this post I feel that although it was a tough day God was with me and pointed me towards that young girl who he so cares about and who's story I shared with you.

mentors bafana bafana trip and retruning HAN student as volunteer

teams line up for the national anthems

on sunday evening we were able to take our 15 sports mentors to watch bafana bafana, the south african football team, play against nigeria in the group stages of the african nations championship which is being hosted in cape town throughout the month. the trip was a christmas present for the mentors from myself and maz however as the national team were on the end of a 3-1 thumping the mentors probably didn't enjoy it as much as we had hoped!

sports mentors take up a whole row before the game
(sive, 3rd from left, looks really happy, not, and that was
before they lost!

saying that it's great to be able to take these amazing young people to special events like that, its definitely not something they would ever be able to do and as with similar trips we have made before to see norway and manchester united play its a sight to behold to see the joy on their faces and the excitement in their eyes as we walk through the v&a waterfront in cape town and enter the stadium to watch their hero's.

as well as the mentors we were able to bless a few of our volunteers with tickets to the game, and although they were working, helping us keep an eye on the boys and girls is somewhat similar to herding cats, especially after the game when the crowd is at its height, they say that many hands make light work and we hope they enjoyed their time.

emma, shana and jasper enjoy the pre-match atmosphere

over the weekend we were also blessed with the return of our first long term volunteer from our partnership with the HAN university in holland, jasper spent 6 months with us in 2011 and its great that he has decided to join us full time for two and half months, we are really looking forward to him helping to develop our sports outreach, mentor our mentors and generally assist shana, bonny and josh, when he returns, each afternoon at the clubs we run in the local community.

and finally can we ask you to please lift our mentors in prayer, lots of them are going through some tough times at the moment, what with them moving to new classes, or new schools, some have major social issues which make it hard for them to commit to our outreach as often as they would like. thanks

car/s down!

you've heard the common term 'man down', well physically we are all fine but we are having some major issues with our cars here at the village of hope therefore we are 'car/s down'.

it all started when we had a few issues with our audi which has been having some electronic problem for a few months but we needed to get that sorted as a priority, however all of the other cars seem to have come out in sympathy, so that's been in the garage for a week or so now with no sight of return, emma's car then broke down on the way to the hope@cluver concert last weekend as is in a bad way after a radiator leak, there is no sign of that coming home soon, mel's car then had some power steering problems and is in the garage as we speak, today the H1 is in for its normal service which was planned but last night my old bakkie wouldn't start when we took the sports mentors to the football in cape town over the weekend and is in this afternoon to try to find out why that happened!

so that's the audi, emma and mel's private cars, the H1 and the old bakkie all in the garage at the same time and on top of that rob has still to sort his air conditioning unit in his private car which is pumping out hot air instead, the joys of running cars!

starting school

following on from yesterday's blog we are delighted to inform you that our dear little girl who has issues around her mobiltiy started at our local preschool this morning, this is amazing news and it's important that she is treated like any other child and to hear her chatting away about seeing some of the other children who have stayed with us at the village of hope at the preschool was a joy.

please continue to pray for her development, which has increased in so many ways, and for her future as we seek to work with her mother in any reunification that could take place.