The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

Meet one of our little girls. Last Thursday she went to pre-school for the very first time. A pretty memorable and important day in any child’s life, but in this little’s girl’s case, it was even more of a big deal. Our gorgeous girl has cerebral palsy in her legs and as a result, has difficulty walking. When she first arrived at Village of Hope, she couldn’t even sit up on her own. Now, after months of physical therapy and encouragement, she zips around the place with the help of a walker. She is determined that nothing should slow her down; she is an incredible problem solver and has learnt to negotiate potential obstacles like little steps over door frames or having to turn corners so that now she does it all with ease, seemingly not even having to think. What is even more incredible about her story so far is that she is now going to a ‘mainstream’ school. Here, we are taking that as a triumph and a massive symbol of hope. Her determination not to be slowed down by her mobility issues is winning the battle. As we walked away from dropping her off with her new classmates, all gathered round her and her frame, complete with pink basket and horn (which we later removed!!), I felt extremely proud of her. Her determination and perseverance through everything she has had to go through in her little life is an example to anyone – impossible can be nothing. 

And the good news doesn’t stop there! On Sunday we as volunteers and our sports mentors were treated by Tim and Maz with a trip to see South Africa vs. Nigeria at the impressive Cape Town stadium. It was great to see how much the mentors enjoyed the evening, watching their heroes in action… even though South Africa had a shocker and lost 3-1. But with two penalties, two red cards, countless yellows, a hit crossbar and a fight, no one can say the match was boring. I felt incredibly blessed to be there and enjoy the evening too – the atmosphere really was incredible, even if my ears were ringing for an hour afterwards from the constant hum of the infamous vuvuzelas! 

Another plus of the week is that sports clubs have properly restarted – yaaay!! 😀 It has been such a blessing seeing more kids back at our clubs this week, and being able to do life skills and Bible stories with them after so long. The mentors have had no problem slipping straight back into their well oiled coaching and deliver the sessions completely professionally and independently. The only slight sadness has been that some of our clubs have suffered in terms of numbers. At the moment, I think it is a combination of the kids not knowing that we are coming to do a proper session as they have not run in that format for so long, but also due to the start of the new school term. On Wednesday, our Netball pitch is right next to the library and though lots of girls passed by on their way there, not many came to play. While it is sad not to see them, and I miss their faces and laughter at the sessions, actually in the real world, it is such a great thing that they are being dedicated to their school work and putting in first. So I am attempting to put my selfish feelings behind me!

I wish that I could end the blog post there, and that for once my weekly round-up only included the good. But unfortunately, as seems to be the pattern in this crazy world and especially this town, anything that is good seems to be followed by the bad and the ugly.  

 

             First off, there has been an outbreak of Typhoid in one of the communities near where we hold our Wednesday club. Typhoid is mostly contracted by drinking contaminated water and can be fatal if not treated. In a community without (crazily!!) access to clean water and proper sanitation, the spread can be fast. Even more crazy is that there is a vaccine that can prevent infections, which most people in the community that need it will never receive, but is readily available to people like me simply because I was born in a country where I have access to proper healthcare and the money to pay for it. We were just about ready to dash off and buy industrial sized bottles of antibacterial hand wash to take to sports clubs and apply to all the hundreds of kids that attend after each session, when it was pointed out that it would be as much use as a chocolate teapot. As much as we want to be able to prevent the kids from picking up the disease, actually washing their hands would protect them for all of 5 minutes. We can’t, as much as we want to, protect them, and it is extremely frustrating. All that we can do is protect ourselves and pray that the outbreak is controlled and those that do unfortunately become infected can be treated and restored to health. 

Then, on Wednesday night as we sat outside on Tim and Maz’s stoop, enjoying a warm evening, the peace and quiet was ripped through by the sound of 5 gunshots, so loud that they sounded as if they were fired just a few hundred yards away. Then the news that a taxi driver had been gunned down in the community of Rooidakke, a few minutes away from our farm.

Though there had been a few months of quiet in the ongoing taxi turf war, over recent weeks it has started to heat up again, with shootings between the rival companies becoming more frequent. Just the day before, a taxi driver had been dragged off a bus in morning daylight and shot dead in front of many schoolchildren and one of our house mums. I can’t convey how it makes me feel to know that young kids, some of whom are probably part of our sports clubs and who we know by name, were witness to such a barbaric act. Our house mum told of how she had to hold some children back from running to see what had happened, and how many of the kids crowded round to see the man’s body. It is frightening to me that so many have lost that childhood innocence, even that they wanted to go and see, instead of wanting to get as far away as possible. To me it speaks of the fact that this is the reality of their life at this point in time. To them, death isn’t that uncommon, and violent crime like this is something to be observed.
 

As if it wasn’t worrying and upsetting enough to think that some of our kids were witness to a murder and live in places where they could be caught in the crossfire, some of our mentors are living with this in their day to day life too. One of our mentors told me extremely calmly and flippantly about how he woke at 4.30am one night to open the door to a man holding an AK-47, asking for someone else who lives in the next room. Later that morning, the men got into a car and within hours there had been news of another taxi driver from the rival company killed. This is purely a revenge war – one side strikes and kills and the other takes revenge. Each time others are put at risk, children are left without a father and fear takes hold of communities. And with corruption amongst the police being unfortunately a big problem, those carrying out the shootings are largely being left to fight it out.

So, as you read this from your nice comfortable living room, please spare a minute to pray for Grabouw. Pray for peace and pray for protection over all our friends and children in the community, on the front line of the violence. Every day here we see glimpses of God’s kingdom on earth, but at the moment those glimpses are clouded by destruction and sickness.   

 

Happy New Year?

At the beginning of December, I found myself driving down the mountain behind a bakkie that had a crowd of people crammed on the back. Every time the bakkie came to a stop or turned a corner, the people standing on the back wobbled dangerously and had to cling onto one another more closely. It was only when we came to a major junction and I came much closer to the bakkie that I recognised them. 4 girls that I know well from one of our clubs, all under the age of 14. Spotting me, they all started waving madly, laughing and smiling as if I had just arrived at sports with the Netball posts. Schools having broken up for the summer the week before, I assumed they were catching a lift down for a day out in Somerset West, enjoying their freedom. As we both drove off and I overtook the girls, still waving madly, I suggested this to the four mentors I had in my car. Yet again, they gave me a reality check: “They’re going to work.” 

Yet again I’d made a Western assumption. All the way through secondary school, I spent my holidays relaxing and spending time with family. I was fortunate enough not to have to work. Even when I got a summer job, I was much older, and it was always a way of earning money to spend in largely selfish ways – saving up for a new iPod, having money to be able to go out for meals… Never once have I had the pressure that if I didn’t go to work and earn money, there wouldn’t be any food for my family to eat. Sadly, as I realised that morning, many kids here don’t have that luxury. During school holidays, there is no option for them to be just kids. They have to go out to work in order to support themselves and their families, something they do without complaint or hesitation. I severely doubt whether I would have been so willing to go to work at their age, especially when learning of the nature of the work. The girls were on their way to search and pick a certain type of flower that grows in certain areas. The flower doesn’t grow in abundance so they will be lucky to get one large bag in the space of day, especially as there are so many others searching all day in the hot sun for the same thing. The pay? If they manage to fill that bag, they are given 50 cents. That’s less than 3p for a day’s work. 

 

While the fact that these girls are able to find work to support their families is in itself a good thing, it has made me deeply sad that as a consequence they haven’t been able to come to sports clubs since school broke up in early December. Being holiday time, and most of the Xhosa community being either migrant workers or descendants of from the Eastern Cape, huge numbers left in early December to spend Christmas time with their family. As a result, sports clubs over the December period were a relatively quiet and much smaller affair. There were weeks where instead of the 200 children we would normally see on a Monday, we found ourselves only entertaining 40 children, sometimes less.   

While it’s been very strange, and my heart aches that some kids are absent because they’re working elsewhere, actually I found the “quiet” (in the loosest possible sense) time to be a blessing in disguise! For the school holidays we’ve not followed our usual format of a skill, life skill and Bible story and the clubs have taken on a much more relaxed feel. It was great to be able to have fun with the kids, just playing mini tournaments, or even sometimes silly shooting games, without worrying about the time left to cover all the content. I really feel like I’ve deepened my relationships with the Netball girls, just by going and being. Over Christmas when the clubs stopped completely and I was able to go on holiday to Cape Town for 2 weeks, I really missed their company, and I am super excited that clubs are restarting this week, with schools going back for the new academic year. 

 

The restart of schools on the horizon has again thrown some home truths out there in the open. Just because it’s a new year, doesn’t mean that anything has changed for these kids. This week, we had a sports mentors planning meeting to discuss a new sports programme that we are in the process of writing for later this year. Afterwards, 3 of the mentors approached Tim privately, telling him they couldn’t afford to buy school uniform. Without the right uniform, they would be turned away from school. Another mentor passed on a handwritten note from another boy in the community who helps with our sports programme, telling of how his family has no money after having paid for a funeral for a family member, and again, without school uniform he would not be able to go to school. It brings you back to the reality of the lives these boys lead when you read a note like that. I think of my school days, and how I always had more than enough shirts, skirts, a decent pair of shoes. Not having any uniform to go to school in was never a problem that I came remotely close to. Yet, sadly, it is a real reality facing so many kids here. Again, like so much of the education system from my perspective, there are some crazy expectations placed on kids, almost disregarding their backgrounds and family situations. Kids living in shacks are expected to be able to live up to standards in place in schools catering for kids of families with millions of Rand in their bank account. Schools exist in the city where it is a requirement of all kids to own an iPad. What kind of crazy contrast is that to kids going to school an hour away that can’t even afford a set of clothes or shoes?

Thankfully, Village of Hope is in a financial position where we can help these boys out and buy them their uniform. But there is so so much more need out there. Even after we’d been out getting the clothes for them, later that afternoon at sports I heard several stories of single parents in the community unable to send their child to school because they had no uniform. It would be incredibly easy to be overwhelmed by the massive needs surrounding us, and how “little” we can actually do as a few individuals and the wider project. But actually, as I constantly have to remind myself on a daily basis, we are little, but our God is big. And He can do immeasurably more than we ask for or imagine. So even though it can feel like we are doing little to meet material needs of those around us, actually I think we need to keep trusting that actually, we are making a difference in the wider community in other ways. There are other needs than just material needs. I think just the fact that we are there with the kids week in week out, even though it would have been much easier to stop the groups when everyone leaves, really speaks of our love and more importantly God’s love for them. Attaching a trailer/sleigh to the back of a bakkie, dressing someone up as Father Christmas, and going through the communities giving out sweets and little gifts shows the kids that we care about them, and because we do it in the name of Jesus, that he cares about them too. We may not be able to fix all their problems, buy them all that they need or make their lives better, but actually we can stand with them, support them and love them. And we shouldn’t under estimate the power of that stand. 

Opposite Hillsides

Quite often it can feel like I am leading a double life here in Grabouw.  At 4pm, I can be out in the community, where people live in shacks and struggle to feed their family. At 6pm, I can be sitting by the beautiful country club lake, eating a meal which although inexpensive, will come to a total higher than the average family in the community I just left will have to feed their entire family off for the week. Because it is so easy for me to arrive and leave, it sometimes become surreal, and there have been times when I’ve caught myself getting less and less shocked and affected by the poverty I see on a daily basis. I guess that when it’s not you personally living in a shack, not knowing where your next meal is coming from, you can get to the worrying position of under-appreciating what people who don’t have the option of leaving have to cope with, day in, day out.

 

“You’ll need to bring your own bedding, toiletries, training clothes, and things to eat with and off…” Our mentors immediately started laughing and looked at each other. Next week, 10 of them are off on a week long course in Cape Town, where they’ll get accredited training, accommodation and food for free. An amazing opportunity for the guys. But, being as we are, not completely in their world and from a Western background where we have wanted for nothing, we simply assumed that bringing their own bedding and toiletries, even training clothes, wouldn’t be an issue. That laughter gave away our oversight. Realising we may have made a mistake, we probed them for what was so funny. “Nothing, nothing…” It was only after some persuasion that one quietly told us, “I can’t bring my blanket, it’s too dirty”. Another one of our most dedicated mentors told us he wasn’t able to come. Again, after some persuasion, we found out it was because he “doesn’t have any training clothes”.

            Somewhere along the line, we’d merged our Western world into theirs. We’d assumed that our mentors would have sheets, duvet covers, pillows. Actually, the harsh reality is many of them don’t have proper beds.  We’d assumed that bringing toiletries for the shower, a toothbrush and toothpaste wouldn’t be a problem – after all, everyone has a toothbrush, right? But no, shacks don’t come with running water, let alone a shower, and not everyone here has a toothbrush or toothpaste.

I’ve been questioning myself over why we made that oversight. For me personally, I think it comes down to the fact that actually, life here in South Africa is very separate. Here at Village of Hope, we live on a hillside literally opposite Iraq, one of the most impoverished communities of Grabouw. Even though we could (provided you cut a few trees down) sit and look at each other, unless you made the effort to go there, it would be extremely easy to co-exist without actual interaction. There’s a reason why it is such a big deal with kids to see us “umulungus” driving or walking through their community. They don’t see that many. 

 

In fact, that’s the case, from my perspective at least, in many other places here in South Africa; in very few places do the two extremes of life collide. Even then, the collisions are subtle. The guy in the car park who watches your car, standing in the rain while you eat at a restaurant across the road, all for R5 (30p) tip at the end of the night. The kid that asks for R1 as you walk across the beach to buy an ice cream. The guys who stand at almost every set of traffic lights, trying to sell the people in cars anything from feather dusters, to tax discs, to fruit. More often than not ignored and seen as a nuisance.

Truth is, it’s all too easy to put your blinkers on and forget about the people that live on that opposite hillside. It’s too easy to get caught up in our own ‘first world problems’, like is Spar going to have my favourite dip in this week?

Even though we’re out in the communities pretty much every day, clearly we are not immune to the perhaps unconscious “put-your-blinkers-on” condition.  The past few days has really awakened me to actually how little I know about the lives of our mentors, away from the sports clubs. Quite frankly, I don’t understand half, or even a fraction, of what their lives are actually like. I can’t understand because I’ve never known what it’s like to live in a shack when the rain in pouring down and the roof sounds like it’s about to be blown away. I can’t remember the last time I went to bed hungry. I’ve always had more than enough clothing for every season, every occasion. And as much as I shiver to think about it, the mentors know that. Their laughter showed it – they know that we live in another world on an opposite hillside. As much as we are their friends, and there is a lot we share and have mutual understandings over, there is a lot of their lives that we will never be able to fully appreciate. 

Today, we went about correcting our mistake. We have gathered toothpaste, toothbrushes, shower gel, water bottles and deodorant for the mentors. We’re tracking down blankets and bedding for those who don’t have, and from the bursting sports cupboard have training clothes for the mentor embarrassed to admit he had none. A small gesture, and no it won’t change the homes they have to go back to at the end of the week. But at least they go not feeling embarrassed at not being able to bring what little is on the ‘kit list’.    

Recently, we have also been able to “pay” the mentors in the form of a small food parcel each week for the invaluable work they do running the sports clubs. We would not be able to run the clubs without them, and the thriving numbers demonstrate what a great job they are doing. Again, it won’t make a massive difference in the grand scheme of things, but it is at least something to bless them and their families.

We still live on opposite hillsides, but this week has really shown me how important it is not to sink into that mentality. The more you get used to something being the way it is, and it even becoming “normal”, the less you question why it is that way in the first place. That’s a dangerous place to be. 

 

Kingdom Come

On my first visit to South Africa in 2009, I remember someone saying that they could see many signs of God’s kingdom on Earth in townships. Though I don’t remember who exactly it was that said those words, I do remember being confused and doubtful that you could see God’s kingdom in places where people live in shacks, go hungry and have little access to toilets or running water. How could someone think that was what God’s kingdom would look like?

Though that trip was only 2 weeks long, after spending time out in the communities and with the people that live in those shacks, I began to spot those signs. When I first came to Grabouw, it again took time to recognise God’s kingdom in these communities. When you’ve been to visit sports mentors at home and can barely see their faces because it’s so dark, or you have to tread carefully through piles of rubbish, glass and used nappies to get to a sports pitch, it’s hard to spot Jesus. I think it’s a very Western perspective to look immediately at the physical; what people have or don’t have materially, and make a judgement on that. Too often, we neglect looking at the emotional needs of the person. Yes, the people here may not have a lot in physical terms, but in other respects they are richer than most of us. I have been blown away by how strong the sense of community is in some of the places where we run our sports clubs. Everyone knows everyone. We went looking for one of our sports mentors in Waterworks community last Friday, and even though it is huge, within 5 minutes we had found him, just by asking people we met if they knew him or where he lived. I imagine that if you told the people here that in England, people don’t even know their neighbours most of the time, they would think that was ridiculous. And it is really, isn’t it? Here, people look after each other’s children, cook together, talk together. One of my favourite things about driving through the communities in the bakkie is that everyone you see will wave, smile and shout “TIM!!!” at the top of their voice. Emma recently bought a car and we were laughing together the other day about how when we’ve been out in it, we automatically have taken to waving at strangers we pass and them waving and smiling back. In England, if you did that kind of thing, people would think you were weird and probably awkwardly change their gaze to avoid waving back. God’s kingdom can definitely be seen in the people and community here in Grabouw. No, they might not have a lot physically, but I am pretty jealous of how life is shared here.

If I needed another example to convince me of signs God’s kingdom here in Grabouw, nothing would make it clearer than our Sports Saturday event yesterday. Driving through the communities at 7.30am to pick up all our sports mentors to go down and set up early before the 160+ kids arrived, I was expecting the town to be quiet. Not the case. Though the kids were not being picked up till 8am by the buses, crowds of kids were waiting at the pick-up points from as early as 6.30am. When I drove by, they all started screaming, shouting and waving madly, the excitement apparently too much. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day!

The kids were not put into teams based on where they came from, but by age. At the beginning of the day, it was a case of getting to know your team-mates, their names, where they played etc. Kids from different areas and backgrounds in a team. Those speaking only Afrikaans mixed with those who spoke mainly Xhosa. Sport has always been called a great leveler and unifier. ‘Invictus’ is a film all about the way in which the Springboks Rugby team was a great unifier for South Africa during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Yesterday, it was so clear to see the effect of sport in pulling people together. By the end of the day, teams were acting like they had always played together. Even here, that sense of community so strong in the townships, shone through. Sitting at that Country Club, watching all the kids playing, having fun and being given the chance to just be kids for the day, it was clear to see God’s kingdom here on Earth. It was pretty humbling to see what a blessing taking these kids to a decent pitch, putting a kit on them, and giving them a proper ball and goals to play with was.  I don’t really know how else to convey the feeling I got yesterday other than with photographs. If you can’t see God’s kingdom in these faces, look again.

  

  

Images by Lisa Baldry

A Nice Problem to Have

Dare I say it? Summer finally seems to be coming here in Grabouw! Yippeee! The past few weeks it has been absolutely gorgeous weather and everywhere is turning so colourful with spring setting in. This weekend, we went camping in the beautiful Slanghoek valley and did a team triathlon to celebrate Emma’s birthday (her idea!). It is honestly one of the most beautiful places I have been in South Africa, and the weather on the Sunday was gorgeous – even if I did resent it being 30degrees when running through vineyards on sand! J In day to day life, it is such an amazing blessing to be sure every day that we’re going to be able to get out to sports in the afternoon with the improving weather. Hopefully, gone are the days when we had to sit on tender hooks and play weather forecaster every afternoon to see if we can make it out to the kids.

As the weeks go by, we are really seeing massive increases in the numbers of kids coming along to our clubs every afternoon. When the sports outreach side of Village of Hope was started by Tim, it was apparently a good session if they had 10 kids come along. Now, it seems that word of the clubs is travelling like wildfire, and if you only get 10 come along to a session, we are surprised by such a low number! Even clubs which when I first arrived here were quite small seem to be growing week by week, none the more evident than with our Thursday club. 2 weeks ago, Emma and I had 8 girls come along to Netball, and yet this week we were amazed to see 20 girls come along, and more who showed up too late to play! Additionally, a new club that was started by some on the mentors on a Monday, which initially had small numbers, seems to also be growing week by week. Every day we hand out collector cards to the kids over 9 years old who come along to the clubs. Each week we have a total of 250 of the cards to give out, and incredibly we are now finding we get to Thursday and it’s a case of having to photocopy and find every single card in order to make sure we have enough cards to go around. Taking the under 9s into account, we are confident that we are reaching around 350+ kids across 6 clubs in 4 days. God is indeed doing some amazing work in growing the scale of the outreach here!

Emma and I with our lovely Thursday girls

40 girls at our Monday club

In there being such large numbers, we are faced with some obvious ‘problems’. When you plan for 20 girls and then 40 girls show up, the nice neat session plan that I sit down and write up on a Friday morning usually goes out the window and we have to adapt a lot of the practices so that the girls aren’t standing around doing nothing. “But didn’t you do ‘PE teaching’ as a degree?” I hear you cry! As much as my degree is being put to the test, and hours spent in Teaching and Coaching lectures, (which I thought I’d never get back) coming into play, we are of course talking about huge numbers, when you still only have 2 netballs, one set of netball posts and some bibs. And of course the fact that I don’t speak a word of Xhosa or Afrikaans. In that, I am always so in awe and grateful for the work our sports mentors. But, having “too many girls” is such an amazing problem to be faced with. As much as my degree is telling me that the hour we spend in the afternoon with these girls should run like clockwork, actually I think that more and more I am realising that just being there, having fun with the girls, however crazy that may be, is an incredible way of showing love and building up these girls. It appears that at the moment, whether it be down to the improving weather or just the clubs growing as word spreads, we are going to have to get used to dealing with big numbers and get used to thinking on our feet a lot more.

Adapting drills with Chris, an amazing sports mentor!

We also have an exciting day coming up this week – Sports Saturday! On the 2^nd November, we are going to be taking 200 of the boys and girls who come to our 6 clubs to the Country Club, and have a day of Netball and Football tournaments. Village of Hope has run loads of these events in the past, and we have been telling the kids for weeks that one is coming up. Unfortunately, because there is no way we would be able to accommodate all 300+ kids over the age of 9 that come to our clubs across the week at the event, we had to cap the number at just 200, and make sure that we gave forms to the kids that we see week in, week out. Such is the popularity of Sports Saturday, that when it came to handing out the forms at the clubs, we were literally being mobbed as we tried to give the forms out. Kids that got the forms were over the moon, and it was hard to see the kids who didn’t look disappointed. We had to make sure that we explained to them what was going on, and that if they kept coming and were committed, they would be at the next one. On the forms, we had to make sure that we wrote in colour pens – it is not unheard of for these kids to go away, photocopy the forms and give them to their friends, so that on the actual morning as we go round collecting the kids, we may still be turning ones with “fake” forms away.

It really showed to me what it means to these kids to be able to go to a one day tournament. Being picked up on a coach, driven to the beautiful scenery of the Country Club, being given a kit to wear, and playing on beautiful grass with real goals: most of us who have grown up in the Western world would take all of that for granted. These kids grow up in tin shacks, have only a few clothes, have to play on broken glass and sand every week and the only ride they get is the school bus or maybe jumping on the back of a bakkie. For them, this Saturday is really going to be like playing in the FA Cup Final at Wembley. I’m sure that, no matter how much planning we have done, it is going to be a pretty crazy day, but how amazing to think that whatever happens, just taking those kids to that venue and organising a day of sport for them is so much more than they are used to. I am super excited to be able to bless them and have a fun day! I look forward to writing about it in my next blog!

Tim, Seb, and I with most of our Sports Mentors at the beautiful Country Club. The clubs wouldn’t run with these guys!

Hopeless?

Last Monday, I held the most gorgeous little baby boy in my arms in the maternity ward of a Somerset West hospital. 1 week old. Abandoned by his mother only a few hours after she had given birth, without wanting to know whether she has given birth to a baby boy or girl. I struggle to think of another time when the brokenness of this world has been as tangible as when I was holding that tiny little life in my arms. Sadly, his story is not unique. Every year, 500 babies are abandoned by their mothers, unable to care for them, just in this area of South Africa. Babies being left in parks and outside hospitals, hours old.

            You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking the situation was hopeless. As I held that baby I certainly did. But, I was proved so so wrong.

17 years ago, the Thembalitsha Foundation, of which the Village of Hope is part of, was started by one couple from their garage, after hearing God’s call. On Monday, I had the chance to go and visit 4 of the 7 projects of the foundation. Having seen the incredible influence of the Village of Hope on the community of Grabouw, and experienced the amazing work of ThembaCare, I was blown away by the extent to which the Thembalitsha Foundation is reaching people all over the Western Cape.

 Bosom Buddies, one of the projects, was the reason I came to be in that maternity ward. Every week, as new mums are about to be discharged, volunteers go into the hospital and hand out packs with all the things they need for their baby’s first day. Often these mothers will show up to the hospital in a taxi, give birth alone and then walk out of the hospital without so much as a nappy or even a blanket to wrap their newborn in. These packs, carefully prepared and colour coded for the sex of the baby, provide them with all the essentials, and the volunteers offer a friendly and congratulatory face for these women who may have not had any family around them while giving birth. We saw several mothers that morning, waiting to leave with their new gorgeous babies. While one had a husband who she said would care for her and her son, another had no-one except her own mother. Having the opportunity to bless these ladies with a pack and being able to pray with them and show them love was incredible. These volunteers I’m sure provide comfort in some form to these ladies, and often they find themselves praying for girls as young as 14 or 15.

What of the little baby boy? He had been paired with a ‘kangaroo mum’, who was visiting him almost daily in the hospital and spending time bonding with him. When he was well enough to leave the hospital, she would be taking care of him for at least 3 months before he was put up for adoption. Hope in a seemingly hopeless situation.

 Our second stop on the “Themba Tour” was to The School of Hope, Athlone. Crammed into a small building, the project offers a second chance at education to young people who dropped out of school before finishing their Matric or Grade 12. They currently have 70 pupils enrolled, and over 200 on a waiting list. Here, education is a great leveller. Once you have gained your Matric, if you work hard, there is no reason why you can’t go on to further study, with scholarships available for top students. We met two pupils, both from Zimbabwe, who for different reasons had dropped out of school at a young age, only to then realise their mistake a few years down the line. School of Hope, they told us, has rebuilt their confidence and given them that second chance. Both now hope and strive to finish their Matric and go on to further study. School of Hope does indeed offer them hope. But, there is a real need for new premises. 200 young people just like them wait on a list for their second chance. Tragically, just a week before we visited, a young man had been mid-way through his interview to be enrolled when he dropped dead of a suspected drugs overdose. A young guy wanting to get clean of drugs and better himself through education. How many more like him could literally have their lives saved if School of Hope is able to expand and grow through bigger premises?

Walking round the back of School of Hope, we came to our next stop on the tour – ThembaCare, Athlone. Unlike the ThembaCare that is just down the road from Village of Hope in Grabouw, this hospice is specifically for children and babies. Many, but not all the children here are HIV positive, and are referred here by local hospitals either to be started on anti retrovirals (ARVs) or to spend their last days. As with the precious little boy I held at the Somerset West hospital, it is not uncommon for children to come to ThembaCare having been abandoned in hospitals. We were told the story of one baby who was admitted into the local hospital by his HIV+ mother, who then admitted herself and unfortunately passed away. The hospital was not aware of her connection to the child and, believing the baby had been abandoned, passed them on to ThembaCare. It was only a few months later that the baby’s father, unaware that his wife had passed away in hospital, was finally able to track down his baby. I can’t tell you how hard it is to wrap your head around some of the stories that you hear here. We had time at ThembaCare to play with the little ones, and it always blows my mind that kids so young could have such unbelievable stories. I dread to think where they would be if ThembaCare Athlone did not exist. This place really is a safe haven where they can get love, care and specialist medical treatment. And within that, the stats really speak for themselves. When ThembaCare was first started, the number of children dying here was 97%. Today, incredibly and in only a few years, that figure is just 3%. Hope in the darkness.

Our final stop on the whistle-stop tour of Thembalitsha was Graceland pre-school, in the stunning scenery of farms on the outskirts of Stellenbosch. In my opinion, the scars of Apartheid are never more apparent than when you take a closer look at the farms. There are still very clear hierarchies in place, and it seems that the people themselves are reinforcing the wrong views: farm owners are white, powerful and rich; their farm workers are black and poor; and the coloured people are in between. That might sound pretty unbelievable; as far as the wider world is concerned, Apartheid is no more, but unfortunately its legacy lives on. It is this segregated farming community that Graceland serves. Graceland aims to provide an education that helps kids get it right from the start. They are given pre-school education, but it was amazing to hear of how the teachers are dedicated to instil confidence and dreams in these kids from a young age. As the head teacher told us: “if these kids tell us they want to work on the farms like their parents, that’s great. We just don’t want them to think that’s all they can ever be.” It was incredible to hear how such a small place is striving to tackle the stereotypes and issues going on around them. Even things as simple as a set “hug time” during the school day, to allow an opportunity for the kids to show love to one another, and be shown love, seem like such simple and trivial things, but it was sad to hear how before this, a hug was alien to many of these children.

Even more heartbreaking is the stories we were told about how these children, as young as 2, are already accepting and taking on the stereotypes and hierarchies lived in by their parents. When twins, also “coloured” but with much paler skin than the other children, started at the school, teachers noted how the other children treated them differently. The children were afraid to argue or fight with the twins, and generally treated them as if they were superior. Apparently, the behaviours of their parents had been picked up. Old Apartheid ways being communicated to a new generation. Fortunately, the teachers have worked hard to show the kids that they are the same as one another, regardless of skin colour, but it was a massive demonstration of how big a task they face. They are really tackling the problem at the root, in childhood, but it seems like it is going to take generations of children growing up with the message, and then passing that onto their own children, before there is long-term change. But, with Graceland, there is hope; change has begun. And if you needed more hope, the head teacher of Graceland, at the forefront of the battle and doing an incredible job was in the first ever graduating class of School of Hope. A girl, given hope through a second chance at education, going on to bring hope to the lives of kids.

When I was holding that tiny baby boy, I felt heavy with the amount of brokenness in this world, and the lack of hope. Fast forward to the end of the tour, and driving back up the mountain to Grabouw, I was struck by the pure scale of Thembalitsha, and the incredible stories of hope. When I think about Village of Hope, and all the incredible work it has done by taking in children and then reuniting families, that seems like a lot of hope given to a lot of families. Then, I think about the 300+ kids a week we reach through sports, and that seems like a lot of kids being impacted. Add in the other ventures of Village of Hope, and that’s a heck of a lot of hope, just from one project in one town. Then when you take into account the 6 other projects, what can sometimes seem to us like small ripples on a very big ocean, seems to become more and more significant. I would love to know the figure of people that have been impacted in some way by the work of Thembalitsha. What started out as a God-given vision from a garage has grown to have massive impact on the Western Cape.

If you needed another story of hope to be convinced, this week we also saw the conclusion of an incredible one. Two children, who were at the Village of Hope for 3 and 5 years respectively, through an incredible chain of events and in the ridiculously short time span of just 10 months, have been formally adopted by an American family of 5. These kids are literally being given a family, and a brand new life, full of opportunity, directly through the work of those at Village of Hope and Thembalitsha. If that’s not a story of incredible hope, I don’t know what is.

Hope in the most unexpected places

Heroes come in many different shapes and sizes. Here in Grabouw, they wear blue uniform, carry rucksacks and walk many miles a day round the communities, blood pressure monitor and scales in hand. As I covered in my first blog post, this town, with an official population of 60,000 people, has one day hospital with opening hours between 8.30am-5pm, Monday-Friday. Appointments are given on a first-come-first-serve basis and people queue outside to be seen; people selling snacks and fruit just outside the gates do a roaring trade. It doesn’t matter if you walked miles to get here in the first place, if you don’t get seen before closing time, you have to come back another day.

            Under normal circumstances, having a hospital with shorter opening hours than a supermarket is pretty shocking. Put into context of the number of people in this town living with either HIV/AIDs or TB (Grabouw has one of the highest new infection rates in the world for TB), and the situation seems pretty bleak. ThembaCare is another project of the wider Thembalitsha Foundation, based here in Grabouw, that I had the privilege of working with this week. First opened in 2007, ThembaCare is a 7 bed hospice for the terminally ill and for those whose lives have been devastated by HIV/AIDs. These 7 beds offer the only 24-hour care in this town of 60,000 people. I’ve been here nearly 2 months and I’m still not sure I can wrap my heads around those figures.

            The known HIV infection rate of Grabouw was cited as 34% in 2007. Now, according to Joyce, the project manager of ThembaCare, that figure is 18%. On paper, that might look like a good statistic, but there is not yet a cure for HIV. So, while you might at first think that people are getting better, actually people are dying. What’s crazy is that HIV is no longer classed as a terminal disease, but as a chronic one. Given the right anti-retroviral drugs, (now free in South Africa for those infected), there is no reason why HIV+ people can’t go on living a long and normal life. The problem appears to be not with actually getting the right medicine, but crazily, getting people to understand the importance of taking the medication, and even more so, being tested to find out if they themselves are HIV+. When I first arrived here and was given that figure of 34% as infected with HIV, I at first was staggered by how low it seemed. Actually, this is just the percentage of HIV among people who know their status.

            Last Monday, when playing Netball, one of our girls was caught in the face with a wayward arm and had a nose bleed. The girls immediately around her seemed caught between wanting to help guide their friend over to the bakkie, and being wary not to touch any blood. A nose bleed isn’t exactly a challenging injury to deal with, but suddenly I was aware that whereas in England I might just give the girl a tissue and demonstrate where to pinch her nose, here I was having to make sure that she did all the work by herself. Add in the fact she can’t have been older than 10, was quite upset from the bang and I don’t speak much Xhosa and it was a very frustrating situation to find myself in. Having seen the way in which the other girls seemed so wary, I sat there and was curious as to whether they knew if she was infected. Finally, I plucked up the courage to ask the girl’s English speaking friend, “Does she have HIV?” Her answer? “We don’t know”. Another problem is that so few people actually know whether or not they are positive. If they don’t know whether they are positive, they don’t get medication or any of the other support they might need to cope with living with HIV. What’s more, they don’t know if they are passing on the virus to anyone they are sleeping with, or anyone who might accidentally come into contact with their blood. Crazily, (yes, I’m using that word a lot today), a test takes just a few minutes and is easily conducted. Even more frightening is that once infected, a person can go 3-7 years apparently healthy, and who knows how many people they could have potentially also infected within that time. When it comes to HIV, knowledge is indeed power.

            So why don’t more people get tested? If you knew you potentially had a condition that while not curable, could be treated so that you could continue a normal life, would you go get tested? Most of us wouldn’t think twice. Unfortunately here, there is such a negative stigma surrounding HIV that people are unwilling to go and find out their status. Myths and misconceptions surrounding how HIV can be passed on, contribute to a negative stigma, and people with the disease often being cut off from families and the rest of the community, needlessly. For example, some people believe that it is not safe to use the same toilet as an HIV positive person, or even to hold their hand. Unbelievably, there was a child who came to be at VoH due to a chain of events resulting from his positive status, and that of his mother. His mother was afraid to tell her family, who were looking after the child while she worked, of their positive status because she was afraid of how they might react. As a result and along with other factors, he did not receive the right medication and was hospitalised, ending up here at VoH. While he has since been reunited back with his mother, unfortunately it’s too common a story.

            With just 7 beds to care for such a big population, and not being able to get a real idea of how many more are suffering, it really is an uphill battle against HIV. The ThembaCare nurses are on the front line. While I had visited ThembaCare several times before, and seen some of the patients lying almost motionless in their beds, this week was a real eye-opener to the scale of the nurses’ work. On Thursday, myself and Cecile, a Dutch volunteer here for 2 weeks, had the privilege of being able to go out with some of the ThembaCare nurses on their daily home visits to patients. There are around 16 nurses working at the project, all of whom live in the communities themselves. Each week, they make around 25 home visits, reaching around 92 patients each a month! If they go on a home visit and do not reach a patient that day, they have to make the journey again later in the week. ThembaCare gets minimal funding from the health department, and keeps going on the drive these ladies have to be able to bring hope to people living with HIV in the community. They certainly don’t do this job for the money, and work long hours.

While Cecile set off on foot with some of the nurses to Iraq, I went with Zonke and Marlene in the car to visit some of the farms, slightly out of town. For our first visit, we drove up miles and miles of dirt track until we came to a small cluster of wooden houses with an amazing view of the valley. While the patient herself was not at home, we were able to hand over 2 months worth of medication to her mother. If it was not for these nurses making this journey, she would have had to walk the 4 or 5 miles into town to the day hospital to fetch her medication, or find money for a taxi (and risk being caught up in the taxi war). We visited another woman and her 3 year old son, and then visited Edward, a young guy working at a farm looking after the owner’s horses. He looked in good health, apart from some bruising on his face from being beaten up and robbed for his phone while walking home a few nights previously. I was amazed to hear from the ladies that just a few months previously, Edward was actually in a bed at ThembaCare, fighting for his life. It seemed crazy to me that this could be the same guy, now doing such a physical job.

In fact, as Joyce told us and as was clear to see when going round with the nurses, while people were once being sent to ThembaCare to be able to die in dignity and under good care, more and more, people are making recoveries and walking out of the hospital. Incredible that people are literally being given their lives back through the work of these amazing women. These ladies are so dedicated to going out, day after day, fighting the elements, mostly on foot, because they know that without their patients getting and taking the right medication, they can easily slip back into bad health, and end up fighting for life. The day was an incredible eye-opener and I think even blew away some of the stigmas or misunderstandings I had about HIV. Before we went, I was expecting to go into peoples’ homes and find them literally skin and bone, motionless and effectively waiting for death. What I actually saw, and was amazed by, was that all the patients we visited appeared to be living normal lives and coping with their positive status. Some looked better than others and I’m sure that it’s not always the case that the look so well, but it certainly wasn’t the doom and gloom outlook I expected. I am without doubt that this would not be the case with ThembaCare and it makes me shudder just thinking about the fates of some of the people I met on Thursday, did ThembaCare not exist. I saw an incredible amount of hope, when I was expecting to only see grief and sadness. These women really are a shining beacon for loving your neighbour as yourself. What amazing examples they are of signs of God’s kingdom coming on Earth, and what incredible hope they are bringing to what would otherwise be a desolate situation.

 

Deep Sadness and Overwhelming Joy – In a Day!

It’s been another frustratingly damp week here in Grabouw. September 1^st – the official first day of spring – was eagerly anticipated, hoping for rainless weeks, warmer weather and not having to play weather forecaster when it comes to sports clubs. However, given the huge amounts of rain and freezing weather we’ve had over the past few days, it’s unfortunately not time to throw away the coats just yet.

Yes, that is snow on those mountains!

 

Catching hail…

Thursday night was a particularly damp one – all day the clouds got darker and as we debated whether to start loading up the bakkie for sports, the heavens opened. None of the English drizzle here in South Africa; when it rains, it rains! While it’s all too easy to moan about the lack of sport and getting wet running between buildings here at the farm, our inconvenience is nothing compared to that of the majority of Grabouw. As I’ve said before, when it rains here, the streets clear almost completely and people retreat into their houses; with no means of getting dry, life is put on hold.

Every Friday, Village of Hope does a “soup run”. Here in Grabouw, there are two up-market farm shops on the outskirts of the town with attached restaurants. Between them on a Friday, these shops donate 3 big containers of soup and boxes of bread to VoH, for us to give to two crèches in the community: Rooidakke and arguably one of the most isolated and poorest communities, Iraq. It is a very strange and stark contrast picking up the soup from restaurants where people are having lavish lunches, to them drive only ten minutes down the road to the communities where kids are pouring out of houses with their Tupperware as soon as they see the bakkie. Within seconds of us arriving, there is a queue at the crèche door as the kids wait for a small box of warm soup and a piece of bread. A whole different world away, and yet people of the same town.

Soup line at Rooidakke creche

Giving out soup on a drier day earlier this month…

Only a few minutes drive up a hill from Rooidakke, the community of Iraq is again another world. While the residents of Rooidakke have brick houses, paved roads and running water, those living in Iraq survive in shacks made largely from discarded apple crates. On Tuesday we run a club here on the dirt road, having to stop play occasionally to let the odd bakkie capable of making the journey uphill to the community pass by. Completely exposed to all the elements, the wind up here is always a confounding factor to sessions. Some days you have to contend with sandstorms, others you have to make sure any wayward balls are collected before they get, quite literally, picked up and taken down the hill to Rooidakke. The community a few months ago was moved further up the hill by the local municipality so more houses could be constructed like the ones in Rooidakke. People were literally ordered to take down their houses and move, and given a few days to do it. A whole community uprooted and banished further away from amenities and perhaps, the eyes of tourists travelling by on the busy N2 highway. As for the progress of building works where their homes once stood? Slow. Roads have been marked out with paving slabs laid supposedly to become kerbs, but no solid surface has been added. When it rains here, water pours down the hill into Rooidakke, and with no proper drainage yet installed, rivers end up pouring down the hillside through the communities. In the heavy rain a few weeks ago, the main road up to Iraq was partially washed away. It became a pretty precarious task navigating a bakkie up the road where small craters had opened up on one side and piles of building bricks helpfully left on the other, leaving a piece of road no wider than a car.

The community of Iraq

View down the hill to Rooidakke on a clearer day

Some of the terrain BEFORE the recent heavy rain

Arriving with the soup on Friday, we saw that the road had finally completely given way with the rain. The community of Iraq is now almost completely isolated on that exposed hillside. Frustratingly, there are two other roads up that hill, both seemingly untouched by the bad weather, that have been fenced off for no apparent reason. It seems that it is not a priority to get these roads open in order to reconnect the community to Rooidakke. With the buckets of soup extremely heavy, we just about managed to pick out a road part of the way up the hillside but it was bumpy to say the least – think 4×4 driving experience day with kids hanging off the back of the bakkie and deep crevices either side and you’re just about there. Even then, we had to do the last part of the journey on foot in order to get the soup to the crèche and the kids needing it. As we walked up the hill, with local boys helping us carry the soup and bread, I was filled with anger again at the injustice of this town. The putting up of those fences and moving of these people up the hill seems to be a way of both physically and psychologically banishing these people and cutting them off from the rest of the town. An out of sight out of mind mentality. Something as simple as removing those fences and opening those roads could make life that little bit easier for the community, and yet it isn’t even considered.

These boys help us to get the soup up to the creche in Iraq every week

Iraq creche

As heart-breaking as it was to see the fresh isolation of Iraq, Friday was also a day of overwhelming joy as one of our little boys went home after being at VoH for 6 months! As I’ve only been here for coming up on 6 weeks (where has that time gone??!!), and therefore only known the children for a short amount of time, it is always strange for me to hear stories of what they were like when they first came here. This particular boy has such a funny little personality and is so full of life that it crazy to hear that when we first came to VoH, he was so poorly that he had to be hospitalised. You would never know it now! He walks round the place with a constant pout on his face, loves having guitar lessons with Shannon, and will wave goodbye and blow you kisses shouting “wuv yooou!” when you leave the unit.

Who says this is a girl’s hat?

Since being here, a lot of work has been put in to both stabilising him so he is well enough to go home and also working with his mother and wider family to support them as unit before he goes back home. His mother, only just 19, has been a solid feature of the unit over the past few weeks as preparations were made for her little boy to go home. It’s been an absolute pleasure to see what a close bond they have and how much she dotes on him. He quite clearly loves his mum to bits and follows her around the place, with lots of tears when she leaves each evening. A particularly heart-warming moment was seeing them cuddled up on the trampoline in the sun, mum fast asleep and son cuddled into her, just watching the world go by.

Guitar lessons

 

Chillaxing with mum

 As I covered in an earlier blog, it may be all too easy for us to assume that all a child needs us a solid roof over their head, some toys and clothes in order to thrive. Yes the Village of Hope provides that, but being here, you really see that there is no better place for a child to be than with their family. You cannot replace the love of a mother or a family home. The aim of VoH is to get these kids back in their communities. So yes, saying goodbye is sad, and we are already missing this cutie but I love thinking about him reunited back with his mother full-time. What joy for them both!

 

“Did you hear the gunshots this morning?”

When you are asked to picture a war zone, you might immediately think of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other places where there seems no end to violence and conflict. In such places, there is a heavy military presence and hourly media coverage of goings on and the fear in which people go about their daily lives. If there is a shooting in America, it will be tweeted about by Piers Morgan and on CNN. In the UK, shootings seem comparatively rare, so that any incidents are the top news story within moments.

We had 4 shootings in 4 different locations across town early on Thursday morning. Hear about it? No, didn’t think so. Unfortunately shootings here in Grabouw and in wider South Africa are all too common. They have almost become part of life; something to be expected on either a frequent, infrequent or rare basis dependent on where you live. So ‘unordinary’ that Thursday’s shootings won’t have been covered in South African news programs. A few days on and the details of the shootings are still hazy, even for us living in the same town. If we were in the UK, moments after the first shot had been fired, we would have known everything via social media. Here, it seems like life just carries on because there is no other choice. The lack of political and media clout on gun crime in South Africa means that such incidents remain relatively unknown by the wider world, and the people, as in countries “at war”, live in fear. This week has most definitely shown me that while to the rest of the world, South Africa is “at peace”, look beneath the shiny surface at the real communities, and it is anything but. Though it may not be on the front of any newspapers, people here live in a war zone too.

“Did you hear the gunshots this morning?” Not a question I was expecting so early on a Thursday morning as I walked up to the children’s unit to do the school run. Feeling pretty apprehensive, I helped our two oldest children into the car and set off down the hill. On and off for the past few months there have been gunfights here between taxi drivers. Not what you expected, right? Grabouw is situated in a valley halfway up a mountain (hard to imagine if you’ve not been here). The nearest town is Somerset West, about 20 minutes down an amazing windy road with stunning views called Sir Lowry’s Pass. You may be imagining these taxis to be the standard British cars with signs on top, but here in South Africa, taxis are essentially minibuses which take several fares at a time off as many people as they can fit in. The so called ‘taxi war’ is apparently happening because of a turf war between taxis based in Somerset West bringing people up to Grabouw and taxis based in Grabouw taking people down the mountain. Apparently that is a good enough reason to pull a gun on someone and start shooting at them and all those they have on board. Though we (thankfully) haven’t heard of any fatalities, one of the taxis shot at on Thursday morning was carrying a group of nurses on their way up from Somerset West hospital and ended up in a ditch, causing some ‘minor’ injuries like cuts, bruises and broken legs. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be on a bus to work and to be shot at for no reason.

            Heading down in the car, I was expecting the community to be swarming with police, armed response vehicles and forensic scientists. Expecting to be sent round diversions and large areas to be cordoned off with police tape. Instead, as I drove, there seemed to be nothing much out of the ordinary. People sat outside their houses, the corner shops were open and kids were walking to school. I was beginning to think that perhaps the gunshots hadn’t come from this community when I spotted some yellow tape stretched round the outside of a house and yard, almost directly opposite the kids’ school. A single police car sat outside the house. There was nothing else to suggest that there was anything out of the ordinary here, I can only assume that whatever had gone on had happened inside. Only the children of the school, usually playing on their climbing frames but today pressed up against the fence chattering excitedly, seemed to take any notice of what was going on. While they didn’t realise what was going on, it is pretty disturbing to think that had the shots been fired a few hours later, many of them would have been witnesses, some as young as 3 years old.

As I drove back, I noticed a few people walking past the house. They seemed to glance briefly sideways before looking directly forward again, almost as if they didn’t want to look for too long. I don’t think I can blame them. While they may not be direct targets, these people are at risk if they get caught in the crossfire of these taxi drivers. Unfortunately, it seems to be the way that so many have so little regard for human life, that they would think nothing of shooting someone who got in the way or tried to stop them. I can’t begin to imagine the fear that these people are living in. Fear that I’m sure extends to the children who we reach every afternoon with sports. Below is a picture taken at a primary school I visited in Cape Town in July. We completed a scrapbooking exercise where the children, aged 10 or 11, had to pick out headlines, pictures and text representative of where they lived. Below is a picture of the poster they produced. Clearly, though those kids at that gate were too young to understand, living surrounded by violence and fear has a long term effect. Childhoods are being stolen every day.

 

With no further gunshots being heard, sports ran as normal in the afternoon. On Thursday, Emma and I head to one of our smaller clubs at Pineview North, a community at the end of the road from the taped off house. While normally we arrive to kids already waiting for us, today the place was deserted despite the beautiful sunshine. As we sat there in the bakkie, we wondered if the gun fight having been so close had meant the kids were all inside their houses. While no one would begrudge them for it, it was sad and made me angry to think that these kids were being denied an hour or so of relief and fun because of the violence. 3.30pm came and went, still no children. Then suddenly, from the road directly in front of us, we saw one of our sports mentors walking towards us, followed by 10 children running after him as fast as they could go. It was an incredibly simple yet poignant sight. These kids could quite easily have chosen to hide away inside their homes, yet here they were, resiliently running out to play. Patrick Regan, founder of XLP in London is quoted as saying:

“Hope: a refusal to accept a situation as it is.”

For me, that image really fits that statement. These beautiful kids are growing up in what is effectively a war zone; there may not be armies involved and gunfire might not be happening every day, but that doesn’t mean there is peace. Life has to go on and there is incredible resilience amongst these children. There may not be peace, but there is hope. These children are that hope. My prayer is that by investing time into our sports mentors, these children will follow on after them as they were running after our mentor on Thursday. In such a messed up place, where gunfire is nothing out of the ordinary, there needs to be solid role models for these kids to look up to. My hope is that these kids are the change in the situation. As is a tagline of XLP, “I refuse to believe that this is a lost generation.”

            Although there is hope and resilience in these communities, please do pray for peace here in Grabouw. As I said, neither we nor these children are direct targets for the taxi drivers, but you never know when you are going to be faced with a situation where you may potentially be caught in the crossfire. Pray for the protection of those in the communities, the kids of our sports clubs and the sports mentors and ourselves as we run the clubs. We know that when we go out, we go out under the protection of our Almighty God – I don’t think I can think of better armour.

“the Lord will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and evermore.” Psalm 121:7-8.

The “Right Amount” of Anger

Another week has come and gone! While it’s been a great week in which we’ve made it out every day to do sports (!!) thanks to Spring officially being here, , it has been a week where the injustice of Grabouw and South Africa has really hit me.

When I was in Cape Town just before coming to The Village of Hope, one morning at a prayer meeting, a lady spoke about how she felt that she has been blessed with “the right amount of anger”. It sounded completely contradictory and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anger being described as a positive personality trait before. When she explained though, she spoke about how having that “right amount” of anger over the injustice she sees all around her in everyday life gives her a drive and a passion to seek change. It seemed strange at the time, but having been here a few weeks now, I can most definitely relate to those feelings of anger over what I see.

After graduating this summer, one thing that I definitely was not expecting to be doing again in a hurry was research for homework projects. In my second week here, one of our sports mentors asked if it would be possible to get some research off the internet for his homework project on the topic of mining. It took me all of an hour to find the information, print it out and give it to him so that he could then do his homework using it. A few weeks on and I have done the same for four of the other boys, on topics ranging from climate change to HIV prevention. Why? While in the UK, such a task would be easy, many of our sports mentors and the vast majority of Grabouw live in shacks with no electricity or running water. They don’t even have computers, let alone internet. The local library has a few computers and textbooks but nowhere near enough. So why are they being given homework to do that they don’t have the resources to complete? Well because under the current education system, they follow the same curriculum as the kids in the private schools. While I know that it is a more complicated situation than I probably realise, it makes me angry that these amazing kids with so much potential are being disadvantaged from day one, simply because they don’t have the resources to complete the homework they are given. What is essentially worse is that while in England, no matter your grades, you move through the school year groups chronologically, here in South Africa you need to ‘pass’ a year in order to move to the next. It is therefore not unusual for kids here to be 19 and still in primary school. On one of my first nights here, Tim and Maz drove a boy to his Matric (final year) ball in the bakkie. Apparently it was like the Oscars, with people lining the streets to the school, cheering and taking photos. To finish high school is a big thing; the sad reality is many kids don’t make it. To be honest, after having a little insight into the situation these kids find themselves in with homework, I don’t think that can be much of a surprise. The heartbreaking part is that, with education being the key to many things, including well-paid, regular jobs, many of the kids dropping out of school may be faced with so many more barriers in life. My anger is that bright kids could be being lost through the net, simply because of where they are born. Sound fair to you?

On Wednesday, the good weather meant that for the first time since arriving, I was able to attend the club held in the Waterworks community of Grabouw, arguably one of the poorest in the town. In fact, this was the first club that had run there for over 5 weeks – it seems that if it decides to rain, it always happens on a Wednesday! Pulling up to the pitch, the scars of the recent weather were easy to see. To get to the pitch in the first place, we had to navigate the bakkie through the tight lanes between the shacks, avoiding the various dogs, chickens and pigs wandering round the place. We then drove down through what was effectively a rubbish tip to a flat area of sand, with a single wooden makeshift goalpost at one end. The rain has been so bad here over the past few weeks that the usually hazardous pitch, littered with rubbish, rocks and glass, was made all the more treacherous by the addition of a 4 ft wide trench running down the middle. It was particularly tough for me to watch the kids having to go down into the water to fetch out their balls and dry them off on their clothes. I was pretty angry at myself for ever having moaned and complained about having to play hockey on the sand-based pitch rather than the water base at Loughborough. These kids have no other option but to play on what can barely be called a pitch. I know it is something that we all do and that being here gives me a fresh perspective on what I take for granted, but when I think about all the free facilities and great spaces to play sport – even having parks in towns – it makes you feel ridiculously guilty for not appreciating them.

You would not be blamed if you assumed that given the places where they have to play, the kids were reluctant to take part. Definitely not the case! I have been absolutely blown away by how excited the kids are every time they see us driving in with the bakkie, a few balls and a set of Netball posts. You can’t drive the bakkie through any of the communities here and not hear kids every other house shouting “TIM!!” and trying to run and jump on the back – so much so that you have to speed up so they can’t! The kids absolutely love the sports clubs and it is an absolute blessing to be able to spend the afternoons with them. It’s amazing the enjoyment that they get out of a few balls being given to them. The other day I spent nearly an hour simply playing throw and catch with two girls who were slightly too young to join in with the Netball session. I wonder how many other kids would have been as content to play such a simple game for that long, and yet it really seemed like they had enjoyed themselves and appreciated us being there. I also learnt this week that if you get a camera out, you will get mobbed by about 30 kids all wanting a picture of themselves – “umulungu, [white person] snap me!” I think I am definitely going to have to master the art of subtle photo taking over the coming months…

So then, this week has most definitely been an eye-opening and tough one in terms of feeling frustrated at the ways things are and the lack of opportunities for some of these kids. Contrastingly though, it has highlighted how important the sports clubs in these communities are. It might seem to us such a simple thing to do every afternoon, but I think the fact that we are there week in week out for these kids when the weather is good enough is so important. These kids need to know that we value them and think they’re important. Just because they were born or live in a certain place shouldn’t mean they are forgotten or disregarded. That certainly wasn’t the way Jesus worked.