Three new children joined us last month: Renier who is 14, 2-year old toddler Kelvin and baby Olwani who is 4-months old. As well as new arrivals, we have been celebrating some birthdays: Clayton turned 21 on 1st November: congratulations to him and on the birth of his son in September this year. Clayton is working and now living with his new family, we are proud of him and he is doing good since he 'graduated' from the home. We also celebrated Ronaldo's 11th birthday and Veronica's 14th birthday - happy days as the photos show:
Zoleka Naleni started as a third care worker. With her joining Katy and Martha, we now have cover for the morning, afternoon and night shift. We welcome her as part of our family.
We are aiming to starting a Community Outreach program during the December holidays called "Project Clean Up", where our children will participate in helping to clean areas blighted by rubbish around Midros and Middelburg. They will also help make other children from the community aware of the problem and get them to take part so we will have a big community 'team' working together on it. We will hand out leaflets in order to make the adult community aware of this problem too. We will have permission from the Council of Midros and M/B to run this activity and we hope to continue it throughout 2013. We are applying for funds in order to keep this up e.g. paper for printing, petrol for transport, casual labour or people to help on this project. We think this activity is important because we want to educate the children about keeping a clean environment and the benefits of this. We want everyone in the community to have pride in their surroundings.
Other updates: the Seventh Day Adventist Church donated two computers to the home, which we will use to start IT lessons for the bigger children as soon as we get the volunteers to do this. Veronica will be visiting a hair salon during the December holiday, she will work and learn for a week the skills and art of hair braiding as this is a passion.
