By Paul McKibbin | Project Leader
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
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By Paul McKibbin | Project Leader
By Paul McKibbin | Project Leader
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