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November 12th, 2007 posting

Update by Jim and Chris Newton, Executive Directors

Health

• Expansion has continued in the new villages of Tsawule and Mangeni. We have planned an AIDS Awareness day in Mangeni for November 24, and have had numerous meetings with schools and the community. Speakers will be the Mangeni Nduna, the Ward Counselor, a person from the Department of Health, and a person from the organization Men in Partnership Against AIDS.

• We continue to take blood from these villages and from Ndawana to the Underberg Clinic every week. There are two big developments in blood transport. One is that we have received permission from the Department to take blood on Monday afternoon and store it overnight in our WHO approved vaccine refrigerator for transport on Tuesday, along with patients en route to St. Apollinaris. This makes our Tuesday hospital transport much easier because we don’t have to draw blood on Tuesday morning. The other is that the Department is giving us a centrifuge, to be picked up in Maritzburg on Nov. 6; which will enhance the quality of our stored blood. The significance of the centrifuge is that it is another indicator of the Department’s commitment to our health centre.

• The big news comes from a meeting we had with the Department on October 29. We called the meeting to confirm that we now are a Health Post and that we will be a full clinic in the 2008 budget, and they declared us a full clinic as of now. It will take a few months to complete this transition, but the mobile clinic from the Underberg Clinic will stop coming to Ndawana as soon as the transition is complete and we will be a stand-alone independent clinic totally funded by the Department. We will be able to offer a number of functions which before had to be done either in Underberg, St. Apollinaris or by the mobile clinic. Some of these are rehydration, ante-natal care, immunization, family planning, dispensing of Bactrim to high risk HIV patients, etc.
  
  Other news from the meeting is that until the community stops fighting over where to put a new clinic building, our centre will be the location for the clinic, and, according to Mrs. Radebe, they will never build in Ndawana until community unity occurs. It’s hard to guess how all this will come out. They could request that we turn over to them the entire community centre to be the clinic (presumably paying Edzimkulu for the buildings, which would allow us to build something else for other programs), or they could one day move the clinic to another building built by the Department, or, since they are calling our centre a hybrid clinic, they might even just continue in our single building, but the significant thing is that Ndawana will have its health centre.

• The Department has approved a project, which we suggested, that will evaluate all our non-medical health people (community health workers and home based carers), so that they will be positioned to be placed on the health grid which someday will apply to these workers. This project will be the pilot for the Sisonke District for evaluating people in other rural villages with the same goal, to place them properly on the health professional grid.

• Finally, we asked for a demographic map of the Umzimkhulu Municipality (which is a part of the Sisonke District) so that we could plan further expansion. They went us one better, and authorized us to create a strategic plan for upper Umzimkhulu (the part of the municipality that feasibly could be within our geographic scope for future years). This, and the preceding project of evaluating health care workers, puts us squarely within the strategic expansion 2 which was proposed to the board in August 2007.

• We now keep one vehicle stationed in Ndawana full time. Given the rain and the bad road to, and in, Mangeni, we can’t go there at all without four wheel drive during the rainy season (October through March). This means either the Mazda or the Rover has to be in Ndawana every weekday. Currently, when there are Tsawule/Mangeni patients, we are going from Ndawana, through Mangeni, and on through Riverside to St. Apollinaris. Ndawana patients continue to go through Underberg to St. Apollinaris. Currently, neither of the four wheel drive vehicles is allowed to stay in the village over the weekend, but the Isuzu is there at these times. Many thanks again to Rotary for the Rover.

Gardening

We have fenced the large plot north (downhill) of the community centre and more than half of it is now in raised beds, tended by at least a hundred people. We expect that area to be completely planted before the end of the growing season. The circle garden area was expanded when Susan was here, and that area now is completely filled with circle gardens. We will be planting a memorial garden south of the CC with flowers and other decorative plants. Many such plants are now growing all over the CC grounds as well.

Education

We held a meeting in Durban November 2 to talk with Snoeks Desmond, the creator and director of the KZN family literacy program (which won two awards from the White House in Washington) about our plans for an expanded creche (pre-school) and grade R (kindergarten) program. The program will have a major English language component, along with a program for the parents, designed to help them help their children with schooling. Snoeks made many helpful suggestions, along with providing contacts for some teacher workshops in adult literacy, which will be necessary to work successfully with the parents. We also will enroll our two new creche teachers in education courses designed to bring their qualifications up to provincial standards. An early childhood development expert from Kokstad visited Ndawana the week of October 29 to meet with the whole team and explain the (complex) KZN structure for crèches and grade Rs. Grade R is now required for any child wanting to start in grade 1.

Our creche in the school year ending in December has 96 children in two locations, both of which have a feeding program, and the average attendance is between 60 and 70%, which is remarkable for Ndawana. A year ago we had about 40 children in one location and the average attendance was about 40%. The financial analysis for education reflects this much-expanded program.

Our plan for housing the creche/grade R program in the school year starting in January will move the children into our current library/meeting room building, move the books into the west end of the skills development building (the classroom), and move our meeting table into the current creche space. We expect the demand for the program, at least partly because of the English language component, to be huge. Registration starts the week of Nov. 5.

Facilities

During Susan’s time here fireplaces were installed in both the clinic and the library building. The ability to heat these building has contributed greatly to people’s comfort, as well as to the number of people who come to the centre during the very cold winter months.

Solar power went through a crisis in the months leading up to winter and beyond. Batteries were using enormous quantities of water, one regulator had no readout, and the morning condition of the system was often in the 5-10% range. We contacted Jon Adams, the person responsible for the donation of the system three years ago, and he recently came to check out the system. The one regulator is defunct and he has sent it back to Germany for reconditioning or replacement. One bank of batteries has been disconnected and the two solar arrays now feed into the other battery bank through the one remaining regulator. Morning condition is now 99%. The company that donated the batteries has indicated they will give us replacement batteries. Jon continues to be a strong supporter and we are very grateful to him for making our solar power a continuing resource of huge importance.

Microenterprise

Beaded items from Ndawana were sold at the recent Underberg Garden Fair. We had a table at the fair and volunteers staffed the table during the two days.

We continue to try to find a way to use the block making machine to produce blocks for sale. The project is dependent on a power takeoff from a tractor, and ours is too busy plowing and hauling sand, firewood and other items to take out of that activity. The tractor continues to be a profitable enterprise which earns considerably more than it costs on a month to month basis, though it needed major repairs in May. We would be happy if it only broke even, because it employs three people, it provides a much needed resource to the centre at times, and it is the most continuously employed tractor in the community.

The centre playground, after some tuneup, continues to be a source of much pleasure to the creche children. We should build similar playgrounds at the other community crèches, but this remains a low enough priority, given all the new activity in other programs, that we doubt it will happen for some time.

Other Thanks

In addition to the thanks included elsewhere in this report, we want to express our thanks to the Stollery Foundation, which has been instrumental in the health initiatives described above, particularly in upgrading the clinic and providing counseling and testing for HIV, to the Eldon Foote Foundation for the support of education and orphan initiatives, leading to the new initiatives in early childhood development, to the Wild Rose Foundation for support of a wide variety of health, education, permaculture and community centre operations, and to GlaxoSmithKline for capacity building in a number of areas within the community. Their generous support of our programs and in turn their support of the people of Ndawana has helped greatly to move the programs along. We are very grateful for what we have been able to do with these funds.

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