11-1+3= FULL!

Driving home to Mum and Dad

The last week and a half as been very busy at Village of Hope. Last Friday we said goodbye to our 22-month-old boy. He had been with us since July 2013. When he came to us he was operating at the same level as a three-month-old baby. He was one year’s old and couldn’t even sit up! We’ve watched him grow and develop into a fine little boy. The parents have been committed to him since he was placed at Village of Hope, visiting weekly - despite the having to travel 45 minutes by taxi - and have worked with the social workers on the areas needed. The family where very excited and had planned a welcome home party for him. It has been a very positive story to play a small part in and it was joy to be able to drive him home and see the family reunited in their community. Saying goodbye is always bittersweet as the longer the children are here, the more difficult it is to say goodbye and entrust the children back to their parents. However we know that, in most cases, children belong with their families and we entrust him into God’s hands.

Within a few days of the little man leaving we were able to accommodate a family of three brothers which has taken us to full capacity. The children’s unit is now very busy and it is great to see so much activity and hear the children playing and having fun. The three brothers had lived with their grandmother due to their mother not being able to care for them. More recently it had become  increasingly difficult for the grandmother to continue to provide care for the boys due to personal circumstances. The grandmother was desperate and needed someone to care for the children for a short period during this difficult time. We are honoured that we are able to provide help and support for a family in need as often situations seem so desperate and there is nothing we can do to help. Although it is exciting having new children, it also brings new challenges for the house mothers, volunteers and staff but we welcome new challenges and love seeing the children’s personalities come alive and continue to develop as they settle in at the Village of Hope.

June News

The winter has certainly arrived here bringing wind, rain and even some snow on the mountains. It’s very cold and makes conditions for the poor in our community even more challenging.

Scubba diving anyone?

Children’s Unit

All the children are progressing very well and seem jolly and happy. We have an occupational therapist who comes once a month and she is very pleased with all children which proves that our wonderful House Moms are doing a grand job!

One little one in particular is a boy who’s been with us for a year. When he came to us he was just a year old and was unable to sit unsupported. Now he is meeting all his developmental mile stones which is fantastic news. The other great news we have recently been able to discharge him home. His parents have visited him constantly since his placement here and have worked well with the social workers and us. He went for a weekend visit two weeks ago and he was positively glowing when we collected him. We are always sad to say goodbye but we are also happy to know that we’ve done our best for him.

We are also further a long with the case of our six year old girl. We’ve have found a foster family for her and it now depends on the upcoming court case to see if the order will be granted so please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

Sports

With the arrival of winter in South Africa this month, our sports outreach programme has suffered due to the severe weather. We’ve major storms but, when the weather has permitted, we have continued running our clubs with energy and enthusiasm.

Our ninth and most recent club continues to grow under the leadership of Aphiwe, 18, and he now mentors to over 30 children each week.

The World Cup has given us an opportunity to put on something special for the children and teenagers of Grabouw, resulting in a tournament to be held on 4th July at one of the local schools. This hundred-person event will run in tandem with the actual World Cup, allowing the children to play while keeping track of the scores in Brazil.  


Rainbow Smiles –HIV support group for adolescents

We now have 15 children at our Rainbow Smiles Club which is amazing. We seem to have more younger children being referred which is giving opportunities to our older children to support and help the younger ones. One of the new children is a child who used to stay at Village of Hope and now lives with his grandparents. It is great to see how we can continue to support our children after they are discharged and as they grow up.

This group also reminds us of the constant challenges these children face. In the last week we’ve been alerted to one girl who is purposefully defaulting on her medication – a serious issue. We are grateful that her parents wanted to confide in us and make us aware of the issue so that that we might be able to help get the situation resolved quickly preventing too much damage to her health, but also to ensuring that we support this girl with the love and care that she needs.

Other News:
The Themablitsha Big Buck$ Bike Ride
What an amazing success with a fantastic turnout! The final figures aren’t in yet but it looks like the team smashed their £5000 target and everyone enjoyed the day getting #Active4Hope! Big thanks go to the team of volunteers who worked so hard to get this event off the ground, to all the cyclists who’s blood, sweat and tears made the event as well as to all those who sponsored the athletes!!!


Volunteers:
We’ve had an unusual few weeks without any short-term volunteers but as of yesterday we’ve been able to welcome Polly from the UK who is spending 2 months of her gap year volunteering for us and next week we have Shae and Aubrei from USA coming to volunteer and assist in our school holiday sports programme so it will feel a little bit more normal again!


Gardening:
Big thanks to the team from Every Nation Somerset West who came and slaved hard on their weekend to help improve a garden at one of our long term volunteer houses. They worked like trojans and have really made the space much nicer for Rob and Emily (who are staying in the house at the moment) and for all the volunteers who will stay there after them!


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!

sports outreach ventures overseas!

tim training the community leaders

we are sorry for the lack of posts over the last week or so, much of that was down to the fact that tim and maz were taking our sports outreach programme to madagascar where they trained 21 local church leaders in the nuances of the sports outreach that we have been running from the village of hope since late 2008.

community leaders learning the sports outreach via
training games

this post serves as a simple update on that trip and provides news about the new clubs that have already started since tim and maz returned to south africa.

'we flew into madagascar via a two stop flight in south africa and then on via a further one hour internal flight to the coastal town of toamasina which lies on the east coast of the fourth biggest island and what some call the eighth continent in the world.

new saturday club set up near 'love n care' base

our days were busy serving with a project called 'love n care ministries' who had visited our thembalitsha projects earlier in the year and where the relationship was formed. 'love n care' run a wonderful little school on the outskirts of the town, have a ministry in a local prison (more of which later), run campus ministry and provide food for street children in the dock area of toamasina. they are also establishing an orphanage in the bush area along the canals which pan out down the indian ocean.

community leader running a new club at the bethany school

the main reason for the visit was to share the sports programme which we have run over the last five years here in grabouw, the programme is loosely based on the ububalo model which uses football as a base to introduce lifeskills and bible teaching, we have adapted it to suit our needs in grabouw and it was great to share it with some enthusiastic leaders in madagascar.

we held the training an the grounds of a local Presbyterian church and the training ran over two days and provided their leaders with the materials to set up their own projects. as we said the course was attended by 21 local leaders, two of whom travelled from the bush village where they will be setting up their own club.

theo sharing a lifeskill and bible story following
a sports outreach with the children

one of the highlights of the trip was to play a match between those that had been on the course and the inmates of the local prison where 'love n care' have set up a permanent church building in which they hold sunday services, mid week bible studies and skills training with the prisoners. unfortunately our mishmash of a team lost 0-2 but the prisoners were so happy for us to come an play a game against them that the score line didn't really matter.

madagascar sits within the top (or bottom dependent on how you view the stats) 10 poorest nations in the world, there is so much need there and people really do live a hand to mouth existence. it really was a privilege to go and share some of the skills that we have with these very open but somewhat held back people and to see them get excited about using sport as a means to engage with the poorest of the poor children in a positive, non threatening way whilst building relationships into the community and taking the church outside the building.

since we have returned the guys have already started two clubs, some of the photos show them with the children, and we are looking forward to hearing how the village of hope sports outreach programme will provide new hope to more and more children as more clubs are set up during the next weeks.

all we need is love.......

baby walking boy.....

our social worker at the village of hope (emma podmore from sunny buckinghamshire) came to our morning meeting earlier this week with a wonderful story of love, hope and progress, we love sharing our stories each morning with the rest of the team, they encourage and inspire us and we wanted to inspire you all too so i asked emma to write up a succinct overview of this story which i hope will give you insight into what sort of work we are doing with the children who are placed with us.

emma writes "we often take children into the Village of Hope who have been extremely sick in hospital and have been severely neglected, they come to us to be loved  upon and cared for whilst we support the and empower the families to be able to care for their children. 

we see the children come on leaps and bounds whilst they are with us which is amazing. One of our little boys who came to us last July, was very sick and in hospital, they where concerned that he would not survive, but once he was stabilised he came to live at the Village of Hope.

upon his arrival we undertook a development check on him and although he was nearly one year old he couldn't sit independently or hold his own bottle, the check informed us that he was operating at the same level at the same as a four month old baby! 

Since he has been at the Village of Hope he has been loved on, stimulated, encouraged and given plenty of time and attention by our amazing house mothers and volunteers. We are now nine months on and he is healthy, running around with the other children and trying to talk. this week we undertook the same development test which showed that he is now operating at the same level as a 2 year old....this is amazing news.

we have been working with his parents since his arrival and they have made significant changes that mean that we are looking at reunification in the very near future.

We don’t do anything out of the ordinary at Village of Hope we just love upon and care for the children and invest it the families but it always amazes us every time how love, encouragement, acceptance and stimulation can have such an amazing impact on a child’s life".

we hope that you are inspired by this story of new hope!

more birthday parties

birthday cake!

last weekend our oldest little girl celebrated her sixth birthday, she enjoyed the day with an outing to 'children's church' at everynation somerset west with josh and emma, followed by a meal at the spur and a film at the mall. josh didn't want to go to see the film, he said it was too girlie but we think he was a little scared as it was in 3D!

and birthday presents!

its always good to share these special days with the children and we took time out on monday afternoon to have a smaller celebration with a cake and present, mommy maz sorted out the cake and emma blew up some party balloons but forgot to bring them out of the office, if truth be told we are sure that emma actually wanted to play with them herself so kept them from the children in case they burst them!.

we do hope that our now six year old felt even more loved than normal during those times and we thank God for her and the year that is to come.

thanks for the support...

the work we do here at the village of hope is made all the easier by some amazing relationships we have with friends, families, church groups, schools and businesses around the world and we thank God for all the support we get from them. it has taken time to build up those relationships and keeping our blog, facebook and other social media sites up to date with current projects is key to sharing our 'thankyous' with those people.

during the six years we have been here in grabouw we have also built up some very strong relationships within our own community, those can be seen during our big events like the hope@paulcluver where we hosted our season of concerts during the summer but most of the help and support goes unnoticed so we would like to send a huge thank you to the following two businesses who were able to provide some amazing but unseen support last week.

the first are the guys at hyundai somerset west, these wonderful people managed to fix our H1(mircobus) with a new clutch in super fast time last week so we were only missing the bus for the daily school run for a couple of days.

the second is our local peregrine farmstall, these guys have an amazing restaurant and farm shop and have been supplying soup for a weekly 'soup run' over a number of years however last saturday their kitchen burnt down but even with all that going on they were able to provide soup for us as normal on friday which was an amazing blessing to the creches we support.....thanks guys!

as we said there are so many other's who help us out in so many ways, they know who they are and we thank them too however we hope that they aren't offended by us picking up on these two companies who really helped us last week!

our 9th sports outreach starts to provide themba to those in hillside!

following quickly on from our eighth club comes the news that we have been able to set up, or at least reestablish, our ninth sports club. this 'new' club is run in an area called 'hillside' and whilst this was an area where we have worked before we did have to merge two clubs together about two years ago and the children from hillside were expected to be picked up and transported to siteview.

although siteview is less that a mile away from hillside and should be within walking distance for those children they are from different cultural backgrounds and felt slightly 'excluded' from the merged club. therefore it is with great joy that we have been able to reestablish their original club, which has been running for a couple of weeks now, and we are seeing lots of boys and girls attend this club which takes place each and every monday afternoon.

we want to thank themba (yes that's the name of one of our mentors..obviously meaning 'hope') for his enthusiasm for reestablishing this club which is in the area where he lives and therefore he is continuing to be a role model to the younger children who attend his club...well done themba!