After we finished out time in Swaziland (Check out my Swaziland photo album), my team headed to Durban, South Africa to spend a couple days at the beach. We had never seen the Indian Ocean before and wanted to do that before leaving Africa.
This is our Ask The Lord month and we were responsible for finding our own contact and planning our travel and ministry. We prayed and prayed and ended up in Johannesburg, South Africa.
We are at Nkose’s Haven, an Orphanage and safe place for mothers and children with HIV. Nkose was a boy with HIV whose fight to be able to attend school gave him international fame. His wish was that there would be a place for children like him to be able to stay.
Nkose’s Haven is the realization of that dream. At the location where we are staying there are around 100 kids and 20 or so mothers that live here. The kids go to school and the mothers help out around the grounds. There is another home that houses teenagers and there is also a farm where they hope to eventually grow all their own food.
The village is amazing, we are blessed to be able to stay in a cottage on site. We were originally going to be in our tents, but there ended up being space for us and we have an amazing cottage with plenty of beds and two bathrooms! We even get to eat three square meals a day with the mothers and kids.
One of the biggest things they are trying to do around here is to get rid of the idea that because the residents are poor or have HIV that society owes them something. Instead, they are trying to create a culture where everyone works hard for the good of the community and themselves.
The other big project here is to try to become self funding by the end of 2012. Currently, an organization is paying for all the children to go to school which costs about $100 per child per month. However, due to theft in other parts of Africa, they are pulling out of the continent altogether. So Nkose’s Haven has two years to figure out how to raise enough money to keep their kids in school.
One of the ways is with an on site bakery. Currently they use it to make all the bread and rolls for meals and in the future they are aiming to make enough pastries to sell around town to help raise money.
There are a million things to do here and when we met with Tiny, the site manager, yesterday we told him our skills and passions and each person’s skills met a huge need in the village. It was great to watch his face light up when we told him about our experiences with counseling, medical, construction, computers, and cooking.
In the morning the girls are going to be organizing clothes to start up a clothes store and Jon and I will be organizing and taking inventory of toys and supplies in the sewing rooms. The afternoons will be filled with tasks suited to our skills. I think I will be working with some of the teenagers with computers and maybe even helping to improve their website.
