impressed with our dutch students, again!

angelique and marijn

since we started work at the village of hope we have always had a heart to enable people to take the step from their first world existence into the lives of the poor and needy third world which surrounds us here in south africa.

there hasn't been a day in the last three and a half years where our volunteer unit has been empty, in fact we have welcomed over 300 people on to the project, some have come on a visit and felt the call to return for the longer term, like rob and emily house, or mel kidd and tim berger, some have stayed for a night during a mission trip whilst others have volunteered for 3 to 6 months and we thank them all...you know who you are!

with the direct action that we have via our village of hope community work, sports outreach and rainbow smiles HIV support group, and our sister project thembacare grabouw with their seven bed inpatient unit and outpatient care work we are able to offer people a chance to work with some of the most sick and needy people in the world.

over the years our relationships have developed with international churches sending return mission teams back to us again and again, the infocus team who spent time with us last week are an example of such groups. we are  also bless to be able to provide practical opportunities for students to come and serve with us, this can be seen via our relationship with the university of stuttgart who have committed to a long term partnership with the village of hope and they have already blessed us with building two eco house under their ukuqala projects.

one of their power point slides

yesterday i was attended the latest presentations from the most recent group of students from the HAN university in holland, maz attended a presentation last week as well. last november me and maz were able to make a visit to their campus in nijmegen and their partnership with our local municipality encourages students to come and make a difference to non government and government projects in and around grabouw.

over this last few months we have worked with nutritional, physio and sports management students who serve with us at the village of hope.

the impact and input that the HAN students have at the village of hope is invaluable, over the years they have enabled us to set up policies and procedures to enable us to run an effective children's unit and in the wider community to develop our sports outreach programme with written documents to help stimulate and engage new ideas on health and life style awareness to the 200 or so children that we work with each and every term time afternoon.

the latest sports students (angelique and marijn) have been working on their thesis which will help us evaluate the effectiveness's of the sports outreach programme, capturing data to see what impact, if any, our weekly clubs have on the behaviour, social awareness and self esteem of the children we work with to ensure we are not wasting time providing something that is having no tangible impact.

at the moment i am busy reading through their thesis, evaluating their findings which compared 100 children who attend our clubs against 100 who don't, i will then have to see how we will implement their suggestions for us to be more effective both in the use of local resource, our time and planning for the future!

this team of students have excelled themselves in helping us to serve our community, even the guys who are part of other disciplines have helped out with some of our sports clubs and we are really going to miss them when they return home next week.

we want to thank the HAN university for their willingness to partner with the thembalitsha foundation through the village of hope and we want to especially thank the students who are a real God sent as we seek to impact the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in the world.

finding new rest

as part of one of our dutch (HAN) university students thesis he needed to find out what difference the sports outreach that we run in the community had made to the young people that we work with, so this morning we (me and bart) spent an hour interviewing a couple of the boys that we work with in the iraq squatter camp.

the area is made up of small tin shacks with limited access to running water, no basic sanitation and no electricity, the local municipality has been encouraging people to move their homes to a new area, slightly nearer to town (like 200 yards!) but on what will become 'serviced' plots...that basically means that they will have a stand pipe within walking distance, access to a toilet, which they will share with another 12 families, but still no electricity.

people have slowly been moving their homes to this new area, and whilst chatting with the boys this morning i found out that the local community have named the place zwelitsha (or new rest)....whilst the name is somewhat better than iraq i still wonder how anyone can call that place 'rest', but for those few families that's what it is and we are constantly challenged by the resilience of these people who live in the most desperate conditions in the world.

the photo shows a small boy who was desperate for me to take a photo of him reading his bible in his new home at new rest!

village goes cow mad

grabouw is a town full of cows and they wonder around our streets and townships quite freely, however all this is going to change with some local government legislation that means that the cows now need to be kept off the streets.....and here within lies the problem, these cows belong to local xhosa men who measure their wealth by the amount of cows they own, however these men don't own any land to keep the cows.....this is where the village of hope has come to the help of the local municipality as we were asked to if we might have some 'spare' land for these cows to live.

over the weekend we welcomed a team of very energetic xhosa men onto the village of hope, where they have put up some temporary fencing, temporary in the fact that we will only be providing the land for a three month period not that i think that their fence will be stolen like our other fencing (which we are now busy replacing ourselves...more on that one tomorrow)....and today we saw the thirty cows on the land for the first time....

...what with great meetings with both cape peninsular university of technology and elgin learning foundation it is now looking like we might be producing our own veg, wind power and maybe a bit of steak for the braai....we are moving forward and continuing to make a difference to our community in very practical ways.