A Scholarship for A Child To Go To School in Afric

Dear Supporters,

We are going back to where it all began: Mmakadi Creche – our first sponsored creche in The Oaks, where South Africa’s future lies! We’d also like to take this opportunity to bring awareness to the recently celebrated Menstrual Hygiene Day on the 28th of May, and how with your help we can provide young girls in our local community with the opportunity to feel comfortable and confident in their bodies.

Bringing volunteers back to Mmakadi Creche

After construction of Mmakadi Creche was completed in February 2016, we looked to support other creche construction initiatives again with the help of the GVI Charitable Trust, including Magapane Day Care Centre in The Willows in May 2017 and Mamoorare Creche in Bismark in September 2018. This year, with the help and initiative of our newest Community Officer, Sizo Majola, we are taking our volunteers back to Mmakadi Creche once a fortnight, encouraging their involvement in exciting and informative activities with the young children. Our first lessons included teaching the young ones how to sing a well-known nursery rhyme about our body parts (anyone for eyes and ears and mouth and nose?), to which the learners – all under the age of 5 – rejoiced in being taught a fun song in a different language. We hope this will soon become a regular addition to our involvement in our local community, as seeing the joy on the children (and the teacher’s) faces when they can interact and learn from our international volunteers is truly something special. We hope to extend our curriculum to include more lessons about the English language to give them a head start before primary school, and to then progress onto environmental awareness matters and how to love nature.

Feeling comfortable and confident!

In celebration of Menstrual Hygiene day this year and with the assistance of the GVI Charitable Trust, we are fundraising to purchase reusable pads for the young girls of our local primary school which we visit throughout the school year to deliver lessons on the natural environment and participate in various youth development activities. Reusable pads are more hygienic, sustainable, environmentally friendly and cost effective than single use pads. We were fortunate to be able to purchase these products for the year 7 students last year, and we hope to do it again in 2020. This is no easy task though, as we have an astonishing 65 young girls in the class, amounting to just over 12,300 Rand. Through your incredible generosity we can still make this project a reality, and you will be directly impacting the lives of young girls in a rural area who have very limited access to effective menstrual hygiene products.

Once again from the bottom of our hearts we thank you, readers, and donors, for your selfless acts of kindness both recently and over the years. Without your support and that of the GVI Charitable Trust, we would not be able to give back to our local community and engage our staff and volunteers in these variable and highly impactful projects. 

Love, 

The GVI Karongwe Team