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| 2012-02-16 | Vicky is 23 years old, born and raised in Austria. She studied Communications in The Netherlands and in Belgium and has worked in different communication fields in Shanghai, Brussels and Germany.
Prior to volunteering at A Reaching Hand, she worked in online marketing at a big German wine company.
Vicky has dreamed of doing community work in Africa for many years, and finally decided to take time off from work and join A Reaching Hand at the beginning of this year. She will be supporting A Reaching Hand’s various projects in a number of ways until June this year. She has worked as a language teacher for children in the past and greatly enjoys working with kids.
She is currently setting up a educational program at the chreshe Ebernizer. When she leaves, the staff will be trained to take over her work. She is also working together with my husband who is, together with Google, setting up a system to help A Reaching Hand reaching out to more people and doing donations online.
We are so happy having her wit us. Welcome Vicky!!
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| | 2012-01-26 | The craving for Cape Town and my extended families and friends have become bearable. Kids are settled in school and I have my mornings back to get my head space back in to A Reaching Hand.
I have many ideas from this side to improve fundraising, one is to approach Google where my husband now waorks (the reason why we moved here in the first place) - I mean, you have to aim high :-)
And of course, my other passion, wine - I wont be short of that here, that's for sure.
Please help us make 2012 a year of hope and dreams come true for many in Cape Towns townships.
All the best from "over there"
Karin
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| | 2012-01-24 | This event was taking place in the rural area of Transkei. Victoria took her orphan nephew Mthuthu to the "bush", since he lives with her its her responsibility to organize this for him.
During the school summer brake thousands of boys who have turned 18 years old undergo the traditional ceremony of entering manhood by circumcision.
They burn there old clothes and dress in traditional clothes for a few weeks, during this time they have to live in the bush in a temporary built hut. Once done they return, hopefully without any health complications, and there is a big feast with homemade beer, they slaughter sheep's and the "man" gets brand new clothes. They are now full of self confidence being socially accepted as men in there society.
For Mhtuthu it was double triumph since he just finished school with distinction and are hoping to further his studies in politic, this would not have been possible if it would not have been for his sponsor Klara through A Reaching Hand.
Fortunately there is no initiation rituals for women at all in any tribes in South Africa.
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| | 2012-01-24 | This is Aron, his dream is to become a pilot. A Reaching Hand has promised him that if he does well in school and pasts grade 12, A Reaching Hand will help him get into a pilot school
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| | 2012-01-20 | The older children have started school now and they are enjoying it. They look so cute in their uniforms, all dressed up every morning. The younger kids mostly stay in the house during the days so they really looked forward to our daytrip together.
In the end of December, Fredrik and I went on a very good horseback riding tour in the winelands (really recommend this if any of you are going to Cape town and like horse back riding and wonderful views; Journey’s End Horseback Rides).
After the tour we asked if they would like to support the orphanage by doing pony riding with a few kids. And they liked the idea! So this day we picked up four kids, Abigail, Zoë and the twins Heidey and Beidey, to take them pony riding. The German volunteer Catharina also came along.
Suzelle, the owner of the horses, arranged for the children to go riding on four ponies. Abigail got to ride on a pony called Pack and Zoë on the pony Zennie. Heidey and Beidey had two very friendly ponies as well. We walked around in the surroundings and Heidey and Beidey (2 years old) have never been so concentrated. They sat totally still and didn’t say a word during the whole ride. Abigail was a bit scared in the beginning but after a few minutes she had so much fun. Zoë is a tough girl and liked it from the very first second. Abigail and Zoë thought it was a competition between their two horses and they asked us to go faster and faster and faster…
A big thank you to Suzelle at Journey’s End Horseback Rides!
This was our last daytrip with the kids this time. We have had a great time with the children at Colleen’s Place of Hope this year as well. Colleen is doing such a great job running the orphanage! Without her the kids would probably live on the street and have a very hard life.
Thanks to A Reaching Hand and its donors, Colleen can keep on helping all these wonderful children who deserve all the best and a happy future!
Tove & Fredrik
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| | 2012-01-16 | This day Colleen, the mom and the founder of Colleens Place of Hope, asked us to take the whole group to the beach again. The summer break is very busy for Colleen since all the kids are at home all day. When the kids go to school, Colleen and the social worker have time to clean, wash all the clothes, take care of the babies, go grocery shopping etc before the school kids get home in the afternoon. Farrell, who is working night shift at a hotel to earn money for the orphanage to survive, normally gets to sleep during the day when the house is almost empty. During summer break all 30 children are home the whole day, which makes the house very crowded and busy. Therefore Colleen asked us to take everybody to the beach, so that she could get some extra time to organize everything before school starts in a couple of days. Every child gets a list of what to bring to school (calculator, amount of pens, rubbers, printing paper, writing paper, working books for different grades, pen sharpener etc). Imaging to organize that for all the kids!
Farrell was working so one volunteer from Germany came along to the pool area at Mnandi Beach to help us. In total, we were 22 persons going! Fredrik had to drive two times to get everyone there. Aron and Emily, two older kids, went along to help him find the way through the township of Mitchell’s Plain.
We had a very nice day again! Some of the kids stayed in the pool almost the whole day. When they get freezing cold they lay down on the warm ground to get dry and warm. We had sandwiches, lollipops, soda and chips. We practised swimming and played “Huggie, huggie”.
We also went in the water slides a lot!
Tove & Fredrik
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| | 2012-01-12 | This day we took three boys to Green Point in Cape Town. Aron, Chad and Jabez are between 7 and 12 years old and have a lot of extra energy. Especially Jabez, who has problems with concentrating and quite a short temper. At the orphanage the competition for food, toys, attention and love between the kids is quite big and some of the kids have troubles dealing with that. Jabez is one of those and he tries everything to get attention. Still, he is the cutest of them all!
To have the orphanage with 30 kids working out good, the older kids learn to take care of the younger ones. Aron, who was the oldest in the group this day, helped us look after the other two boys. Since Aron is older they listen very carefully to what he says. Still, Aron is only 12 years old so of course he loved all the playing as well.
We started with playing putt-putt. The price for the winner was to choose what ice cream we should eat in the afternoon. The boys were very good at playing and Jabez only got angry a couple of times when the ball didn’t go his direction. Aron even did a hole in one on hole 14! Very good! Aron also won the whole thing and chose jelly ice cream later on.
After the putt-putt it was time for lunch. We went to a hamburger place and had a delicious lunch with a lot of chips, ketchup, mustard and milkshake in different tastes. Then we were all ready for some playing again.
We first went to a small beach and the boys love swimming so of course they took of their clothes and got into the water. The water is very cold, maybe around 12 degrees, but that didn’t stop them! We also went to a playground where the boys started to play “Cops and robbers”, the cop is chasing the robbers all around the playground until he catches them. Then another one becomes the cop and the game continues. They were laughing hysterically!
In the car on the way back Chad said to us, with big eyes and a huge smile:
- We have been eeeeeeeverywhere today. Lekker!!
(Lekker means awesome in Afrikaans.)
Tove & Fredrik
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| | 2012-01-12 | Last year we noticed that the kids don’t get a lot of quality time with adults. They spend most of the days with the big group of children at the orphanage and Colleen and Farrell, who run the orphanage, don’t have time to spend quality time with all of them. Therefore we decided to bring the kids in smaller groups to do something exciting with the two of us.
This day we took three girls to pick strawberries in Stellenbosch. We got a plastic box each and started to look for big, red, sweet strawberries. We also got to eat as much as we could during the picking. The girls were all red of strawberries on the fingers, t-shirts and around their mouths when we were done.
We continued to have lunch at a restaurant and the kids ordered milkshake and fish and chips. We went to a playground and had a lot of fun. The oldest girl, Niquita, is 13 years old and very responsible for her younger sisters.
On the way back we bought ice cream. The girls served ice cream and strawberries to the rest of the kids at the orphanage when we got back. A very nice day out on the strawberry field!
Tove & Fredrik
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| | 2012-01-26 | We (Tove and Fredrik from Sweden) were helping out at Colleen’s Place of Hope in January 2011 and we are now back in Cape Town again to help out during the children’s summer break. We will be going on day trips with the kids to make their summer break more memorable. We will also write here in the blog to let you know more about Colleen’s Place of Hope and the children’s life at the orphanage.
The first day we went to a pool area close to the beach in Muizenberg. We took 14 kids and Farrell came along, Farrell and his wife Colleen run the orphanage. The kids have hardly been outside or away from the orphanage during the whole summer break so this trip was really something they looked forward to. There are 30 children living at Colleen’s Place of Hope and Colleen, Farrell and a social worker are doing a great job running it. They are mostly busy with cleaning, cooking, washing, grocery shopping etc so unfortunately there is no time to take the kids to a playground. Since it is only a few adults looking after all the kids it is also hard to let them play on the street. The neighbourhood is not very child friendly.
When we arrived in the morning some kids were all packed and ready to go, some were still sleeping. Jabez, a cute boy with a lot of extra energy, met us in the door with his towel. He ran immediately out to the minivan and took a seat. What if he missed the beach trip!
The kids coming along to the pool area were between 4 and 13 years old. You can really notice that they have been inside too much these last weeks. When we got to the pool area everyone waited till Farrell said “OK” and then they just ran into the pool – screaming, playing, swimming and laughing. The pool area was just perfect! It had one pool for small kids, one for older kids and two water slides. When the slides opened almost all kids ran to stand in the line. The younger kids got to ride with Fredrik and the older kids on their own. They had so much fun and hopefully they got rid of some energy this day!
Tove & Fredrik
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| | 2011-11-27 | We want to express our sincerest thank you to the Swedish wine tasting club Munskänkarna and Håkan Larsson, wine writer and author, who tired-less have travelled the country, holding wine tastings at no charge.
Instead Munskänkarna have donated a "wine tasting fee" at each tasting to A Reaching Hand. This year the sum came to a whooping 100.530 Kr!! Thanks for your amazing support!
An huge eulogy to Håkan for his continuous work as an ambassador for A Reaching Hand.
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