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September 13 , 2005 posting, by Jim

It’s been over six months since we’ve written to you to update you on what we are doing in Ndawana. The long silence has been punctuated with many successes and some huge frustrations and sadness.

Community Centre

First in the list of successes is that the community centre is very nearly complete: the light manufacturing building is complete and occupied for most of every day, the clinic needs only a day of finish plastering and then paint and it can be fully open, the learning centre/library plastering is almost complete but needs paint, doors and roof cap at the top of the thatch, the daycare centre/kitchen needs only paint, doors and roof cap. Grounds accessibility is still underway. People can and are using the centre, but the rains are coming and we are working full time to get drainage finished. Large drainage channels are in to carry away most of the deluge that sometimes comes down the mountain behind the centre, but channels around each building are still underway. Because of the slope, we need large retaining walls upslope from each building and drains around each building with bridges across them for access. We also need stairs and ramps for people with disabilities. All this should be complete before the large daily downpours begin sometime in October.

Solar power for the centre is being donated by South African and German companies. Along with this we will be able to light 10 homes with solar power in a market test of the feasibility of solar power for all the homes (600+ homes, each of which consists of from one to four separate buildings). The rumors of grid power coming to Ndawana continue to proliferate, but grid power has been promised there for at least 12 years now, so we are very grateful to have solar power in the centre, which will enable us to operate in the evenings and to have comfortable lighting on the dark days of the rainy season.

Permaculture Project

We are starting the permaculture garden, complete with fence to keep out wild things, cows, pigs, goats, chickens, etc. The fence is being built with volunteers provided by the chief. There are a number of volunteer gardeners, who will plant using one meter circles watered by a buried two liter pop bottle. These gardens will be very frugal in the use of water and easy to tend. We are also planting potatoes and other crops in conventional rows down slope of the centre.

The learning centre/library will be officially open in a couple of weeks, and many children already are coming to read and borrow books while the library is temporarily in the manufacturing centre. Literacy classes also will be conducted in the learning centre. Women are coming to sew, bead, talk about home based care, bring their new babies for the new mothers group, and just hang out to chat. Young people are coming in increasing numbers to get free condoms. Exactly what we hoped for.

Children in Temporary Learning Centre

There are trips to Centocow for St. Appolinaris hospital (two hours each way and unreachable in one day by taxi) once or twice a week for people who can't get there on their own. People who are taken to hospital are getting voluntary HIV testing, help for pregnancies, and care for many illnesses and disabilities, including TB which is the major opportunistic infection which kills people with AIDS here. Most, if not all, people who test positive for HIV here are sharing their status with us and with the group in that day’s trip. This will go a long way toward starting the work toward ending stigma. Thirteen women have been trained, in Ndawana, as home-based care workers.

Starting next week there will be a trip per week to Mzimkhulu to take people to Home Affairs for documents and Social Development for grant applications. Those departments are also now coming occasionally with mobile units to Ndawana, and our current strategy is to encourage them to come here more often. We are planning orphan feeding, which is very complex logistically. The kitchen will be the last building to be open, but this will start soon.

We expect Dr. Mnguni (African female) to start her visits to the clinic when it is open, again in a couple of weeks. We are also in the middle of a team workshop to gear up for the rest of this year. Most of the work to date has focused on the construction of the centre, and now we are switching gears dramatically to the programs the centre is intended to host.

Holly Wright (a Canadian living with her partner Carlene Shaw in Johannesburg) has written a song called Make Some Noise (break the silence about AIDS, poverty, violence against women and girls, etc.). Make Some Noise will be the theme of our opening on Dec. 1, which is World AIDS Day. The opening is also right in the middle of this year’s16 days of activism against gender violence (this year's 16 Days campaign theme, as a continuation from 2004, emphasizes the connections between women's human rights, violence against women and women's health, and the detrimental consequences violence against women has on the well-being of the world as a whole). We need Canadian journalists, broadcasters, etc. to be here for that. Any help from anyone to that end will be much appreciated. We understand some of you hope to see Stephen Lewis when he is in Edmonton. We have been told he can't come to the opening, but who knows what personal contact could do.
Sadness is due to the many deaths of Ndawana people, including Sibusiso Duma, a member of our team. Two other members of our six-member team are HIV positive. Many of the deaths are of people close to the team and to us.

Frustrations are mainly due to vehicle breakdown, caused primarily by heavy loads and bad roads, creating huge expenses. We have traded in our two bakkies for two better vehicles, which we hope will provide better service.

Funding for 2005/06 comes 13% from government, 37% from private industry and 50% from individual donors.

To date we have had 22 volunteers, plus Chris and me, from Canada. Volunteers who will be here between now and the end of 2005 include:

Kathleen Paton - nurse
Larry Rathnavalu - social worker
Marg Rathnavalu – teacher
Maya Rathnavalu - musician
Gabrielle Campbell - physiotherapist
Blaire McCalla - new business graduate
Barb Borsutzky - teacher
Penny Malmberg - musician
Jim Malmberg – psychiatrist
Tim Senger – businessman, musician, documenter of Edzimkulu since our beginning

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