Help Educate 22 Children in Zandspruit, S.Africa

Education has presented a challenge for the children of Thandanani in 2020.

Estimates in South Africa show that up to end September children have lost between 30 and 59 school days (depending on their grade) during the pandemic, and although schools are now back they will probably lose more between now and the end of the year due to social distancing measures e.g. half the class only attending school every alternate day.

So with the return of school attendance it’s definitely been a whole new experience for our Thandanani children, not only having to convince them to wear masks all day at school, but then having to continue with online lessons on the alternate days at home.

And it’s also been a learning curve for our house parents who have to keep track of who is at school on which day given that it varies by grade, and the fact that our children attend 7 different schools, not to mention trying to figure out which online class which child should log into on which day. And we’ve had to change our mode of transport because children that would normally have gone to school in a mini-taxi (16-seater microbus) no longer do so because of the risk of the virus in that environment, and in place of that we have decided to take them to school and back ourselves, with some schools being up to 20 kms away and the resultant cost of fuel and wear-and-tear on our vehicles.

But notwithstanding the challenges we remain upbeat because not only is education taking place, but we’re surviving the pandemic, and our children have remained virus free for which we are extremely grateful.

And of course we owe a debt of gratitude to you our supporters, and thank you once again for every donation whether big or small that has been helping us to survive the Covid-19 challenge.

Best wishes

Paul

Links:

• Thandanani House of Refuge

As I write this report we are still in a state of semi-lockdown, with our children just starting to tentatively go back to school, which is being spread over the coming weeks with a grade at a time going back. We just hope that it proves possible to keep them socially distanced, and that we can keep them wearing masks as the current law dictates in South Africa.

Life in South Africa has certainly been a challenge for the last 3 months, not least for our children at Thandanani – imagine keeping 22 kids indoors for the whole 3-month period !!! I take my hat off to our dedicated house parents who have stuck to their task during this time, and have done a sterling job, but who are also very thankful that the schools are starting to open!

Of course education didn’t come to a standstill while we were in lockdown, as every school started presenting online lessons, and Zoom classes. This of course presented us with the challenge of not having enough PC’s or tablets or mobile phones to keep everyone connected when they needed to be, and created an exponential cost in data charges. But we were blessed with many coming to our rescue in the form of PC’s and donations of data.

But Covid-19 has also presented us with another challenge namely a funding challenge, due to the fact that a lot of the money that we would normally have received from corporates has been re-directed to Covid relief schemes, not to mention the fundraising events that we would have run which are now in jeopardy, hence the new project that you would have seen that we launched on GlobalGiving to try and fill the gaps of lost income.

But I have no doubt that we will survive this challenge and come out the stronger for it, and of course we are forever grateful for your support to help us over these hurdles.

Given the current situation I unfortunately don’t have any recent photos of our children that I can share with you, so I’ve included a photo of two of our children that was taken at a cycling fundraising event at the end of 2019.

Best wishes

Paul

Links:

• Thandanani House of Refuge