Here's the last of the updates for now...
10 Families
The past four months for the 10 Families project has seen a lot of school uniform and clothes donations, food parcels, cementing, gardening, HIV ed, and general catch up of the families. The volunteers especially enjoyed cementing Gogo Joyce’s house. It was great to see everyone’s enthusiasm and passion to make Gogo Joyce’s house habitable. She has long been settled into her weatherproof house, and can’t thank everyone enough for her new home! Volunteers are currently building her a fence to protect her vegetable garden from greedy cows.
At the beginning of the year we were unable to find one of our families, Mthembu 2. The husband passed away, and due to the culture saying the house is his, his family asked the wife and four kids to leave. They were left with literally nothing. We have regular contact with her and have offered support in many ways; food, clothing, and CV writing. The wife has had several job promises that have unfortunately fallen through and she has recently become very unwell and unable to work. But hopefully there could be a light at the end of the tunnel as she may be able to claim the family home back for her deceased husbands children. Fingers crossed!
Support Groups
The Support Groups have had a good start to the year; beaches, braai’s and a baby. Both groups have covered a wide range of health topics from worms to itchy parts to back ache to epilepsy. Some of the topics have provoked lots of questions, discussions and sometimes even friendly debate; most interesting being “I’m going to die because my husband won’t wear a condom!” The two men in the room backed up her husband, and the rest of the women in the room defended the female point of view to condom usage.
For those of you who know Cindy, she will be leaving Support Group as well as Eswenelisha next week for Durban. She's going there to train as a nurse. Good luck Cindy!
HIV Education
HIV education started very well at the beginning of the year with full if not overflowing classes. However, numbers have decreased in the last month, but with posters up in the clinic and new areas to educate; the Secondary School and 10 Families, there is always away to get the HIV ed word out there. From January to the beginning of March our volunteers successfully passed 94% of their students, a great pass rate! HIV education has also been doing well in the Primary school.
The volunteers have enjoyed using the Secret Question box; a way for the kids to ask questions they may be too shy or embarrassed to ask. It has been hugely popular with the kids and has been a great way for the education to be more effective.
April was a quiet HIV education month, but our two resident comedians took it upon themselves to educate and entertain fellow volunteers with an edited and very witty version of the adult education over the braai (BBQ).
Clinic
Eswenelisha Clinic is one of our newest projects, only starting at the beginning of the year. We’re pleased to say that the relationship between the clinic and African Impact is getting stronger and stronger. The volunteers find the clinic really interesting as they get to see how the rural South African medical system works; very different to what we’re all used to. The Clinic really appreciate the support the volunteers offer to the staff and patients on both the busy and the quiet days.
“I would love to come back. I have seen things that have opened my eyes and my mind, and have experienced laughter, sadness and joy all in such a short space of time.” Rhiannon
No comments:
Post a Comment