We are thrilled to announce that the Love to Langa Swimming Academy at Philippi Children's Centre is finally complete. The finishing touches have been accomplished and now all we need is for the building inspectors and project manager to sign off the pool as per the conditions required by City of Cape Town planning.
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Dear Donors and Friends:
After three years of hard work, planning, and fundraising, we are finally just about ready to open the Love to Langa Swimming Academy at Philippi Children's Centre!
The building is completed, the water is filled, the finishing touches are being done and we hope to have the official opening by the end of November.
It was a special joy to have Carmen, a Love to Langa Advisory Board member from Philadelphia, PA, visit the site this week while she was on vacation with friends in South Africa. Carmen is the manager of business and employee engagement at a major pharmaceutical company. She said, "Having been involved with Love to Langa at the inception of this project, I am so gratified to be able to see its completion in person. We are so proud to be able to offer this first-of-its-kind lifesaving opportunity to the children of Philippi Children's Centre."
Thank you to everyone for helping to make this accomplishment possible! We are counting on your continued support to enable every child at Philippi Children's Centre to have swimming lessons.
We look forward to sharing news and photos of children learning in and enjoying the pool in our next report.
My husband, Jon, and I were thrilled to travel from Philadelphia to Cape Town last week to check on the progress of the Love to Langa Swimming Academy at Philippi Children's Centre. Despite the rainy winter in Cape Town stalling work for quite some time, construction is now in full swing and the walls have started going up.
On a beautiful, sunny day, we gathered with the Philippi Children's Centre Committee and Viv, who will be running the swim school initially. The plan is to professionally run the school for up to two years, while training members of the community to take over so that it will become a sustainable resource for the school and community. With construction going on in the background, we unveiled a temporary sign recognizing the major donors to this project, which will be the first learn-to-swim pool of it's kind in the Townships near Cape Town.
It was very gratifying, as well, to see the beautiful, completed Love to Langa classroom, sponsored by our donors. This kindergarten classroom is equipped to a high standard and principal Sweleni proudly showed us around.
Weather cooperating, we look to see the swim school completed in the next couple of months and the plan is for the official opening to occur in November on the school's parent visiting day.
Endless thanks to you, our generous donors, for helping to make this dream a reality. We are anxiously awaiting the first sponsored swimming lessons and with the Olympic Games currently occurring, Viv told us her own dream is to identify and train a future triathlete from the Townships.
Please see the link to visit our Facebook page for more photos!
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Thanks to the generosity of donors like you to this project, we were able to fund a new classroom Philippi Children's Centre (PCC) a couple years ago and we continue to fund scholarships for children to attend school. We wanted to provide you with the latest update for the Love to Langa Swimming Academy, which will not only benefit children at PCC, but the larger community as well.
BPAS, an architectural company was hired to design the pool plans. After each draft, the PCC management committee and Love to Langa had to approve. When the drawings were completed in September 2015, the PCC committee gave its final approval and requested parking spaces be reduced in order to make the footprint smaller.
In October 2016, the plans were submitted to the planning offices in Athlone, Cape Town.
The procedure was as follows:
Submission of plans and all documentation:
This followed a visit from planning to PCC in December to ensure that the architect took the correct measurements and all the structures on the plans were on site. This was completed and the application was moved to Land Use Management (LUM.)
LUM requested the following:
After submission of the LUM documentation, a fee was paid. This fee was for the request to decrease parking and for Advertising. "Advertising" means visiting the neighbors to ensure there are not any objections to the build. We are currently at this stage. This is the longest stage. Due to December and January being holidays, there is South African legislation that no advertising would take place from 12 December to 12 January. We were informed that Advertising for the pool started on January 15, 2016.Once the LUM application has been passed, a scrutiny fee will be paid. The application will then move to BDM (Building Development Management). An engineer’s letter will be requested. Once that has been approved, planning approval will be given to start the build.
We anticipate that if all goes according to plan and taking into consideration planning’s rules and regulations, we should be starting the build in the beginning of March 2016. Whew! It's been a long and complicated process, but we are so thrilled that the Love to Langa Swimming Academy is in our sights!
Thanks again for your incredible support and we look forward to showing you photos of the building process shortly!
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