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April 2nd, 2007 posting
Executive Directors' Update, by Chris and Jim Newton
Events and accomplishments for the previous two months:
Health
We tested over 300 people, most of them in two adjoining villages, Tsawule and Mangeni. We had been asked by the ward councilor to extend our testing beyond Ndawana, and there has been a tremendous response on the part of the people. We are also collecting blood from these villages, but have told the people that getting themselves into Underberg or St. Apollinaris for treatment, where necessary, is their responsibility. We don’t have the capacity to take on that additional transportation. Virtually all of this has been planned and carried out by the team and the community health workers. We have an incredible group of women, and clearly this is where the village leadership is developing.
With respect to the previous paragraph, we are expecting a draft contract from the Sisonke Department of Health to provide VCT and perhaps other health care to both Ward 1 and Ward 3, which would be a huge extension of our area of influence and care. We have had absolutely no success in asking for a draft version, so we know virtually nothing about the actual terms it will contain. Any such contract would require board approval, and we will not undertake any such project without significant additional funding, which would have to include additional provision for transport, because we’re talking about a large area served only by very poor roads and our existing and planned transportation would be totally inadequate for the (imagined) task.
18 more people on ARVs were transferred to Ndawana, making a total of 36 now receiving ART exclusively in Ndawana.
Food has become available from the Department of Health for people on ART, but has mostly been unavailable to Ndawana, because there currently is a jurisdictional dispute. St. Apollinaris says we belong to Underberg, and vice-versa, so neither of them is providing the food to Ndawana. The matter is under discussion.
Education
We now have two crèches (pre-schools) in operation, one at the centre and one in the Pote neighborhood, each serving about 30 children. The Pote building was a donation (for use, not for keeps).At present each crèche operates 2 ½ days a week because the only teacher is serving both crèches. For a short time Busisiwe was teaching at one crèche and the longtime crèche teacher at the other, but Busisiwe is now on a six month leave of absence for personal reasons. One of the two orphan house mothers, Thanda, has agreed to train as a crèche teacher. She is young, smart, very attuned to young children, and has good English. She is delighted with the opportunity, and we see her as a possible new team member at sometime in the future.
All in all, the crèche initiatives are going very well.
High school tutoring has been much less successful. As you know, teachers don’t teach and often don’t come. Carolyn and Dave tried working with teachers in their classrooms, but their presence inevitably meant that the teacher left the class to them. It wasn’t our intention to replace them, so we stopped working at that level. Then Carolyn and Dave asked the teachers to get kids signed up for tutoring at the centre and that took weeks. Now, tutoring in English and math/science is ready to go.
Tutoring in those two areas has been underway for several weeks for most of our community health workers and team members, all of whom want either to complete matric or upgrade their matric scores to prepare them to undertake more education/training. There is a lot of enthusiasm for this.
Orphan Support
We have made slow but steady progress in getting grants. The most recent trip to Umzimkhulu registered another three caregivers and their five orphans for foster care grants. The number of grants continues to rise, and we will send a report of the actual number of grants to the orphans and caregivers of Ndawana when we complete an ongoing survey.
We continue to provide food to some 170 orphans and caregivers, with the next food delivery to be made on April 2.
Community Centre
The clinic renovation is finished and it has turned out to be a very effective building. The road is finished, the ramp into the clinic from the road is well underway, and the gravelling of the entire centre grounds to deal with the mud problem is well underway. We will be building stairs into the clinic at the south door soon.
Financial
Spending to the end of March is just under R1,023,000, which includes the loss from the theft last May of R27,000. Total budget for the year is R1,180,000. We estimate expenditures for April (end of year) at R100,000, so we expect to end the year with spending on budget or below.
Other
We had a felting workshop and women are making lovely felt material, which will be made into clothing items (some beautiful tams are already made) to be decorated with beads, which will be sold in Underberg at the Driftin shop. We now are the exclusive suppliers to the shop of beaded and felted items. The owner thinks our quality is so good that she is canceling purchases from other South African craftspeople. This is the beginning of the market we had hoped for.
We bought another 530 beaded items from our beaders, with beautiful and unique designs.
We had a gogo (grannie) appreciation day and 180 grannies came. They had a great time singing and listening to health news from our nurse. See story by Kathleen Paton.
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