Dumelang baena!

Well the rains finally lifted last Friday morning. I promptly went out visiting with People of Hope, forgetting both hat and suncream & ended up looking like the stereotypical Brit abroad! Very embarrassing. My forehead has only just returned to it's normal colour, and my arms have started peeling.

This week has been good. I've pretty much worked out what I'm going to be doing here. One of my main focuses is going to be working with Mapheo - I'm now the official administrator & will also be helping with home visits. They really needed someone to take on the admin, as at the moment there's no central record of which children are visited each week and how they are. We also want to keep a height & weight chart for each child so that it's easy to spot who's particularly malnourished so that we can help where necessary. Our main obstacle to this at the moment is obtaining dates of birth for the children, as most won't have a birth certificate. We will have to accept an estimate for many.

Mapheo has around 50 children on the books. Children are only allowed to come by invite, to ensure that we are helping the most vulnerable in the community. They also need to be children that the church has contact with generally - either through People of Hope, the School or the actual church services. Each Wednesday and Thursday afternoon they come along to the church. On Wednesday's they have a structured teaching on a life skill & bible teaching. So for instance this week was about looking after your teeth (they all got given a toothbrush and paste for Christmas), and then also a biblical teaching on watching what you say. The children then split into younger and older groups for activities. Then on Thursday's they come and just play. Most of them won't have toys at home, and also don't have any adults playing with them, so it's really important that they have time to just play with us. This Thursday, the children trudged through a true African storm (if you've been to Africa, you'll understand!) to get to church. They arrive soaking wet, many have no shoes, but they are so eager to come that even that awful weather won't keep them away. I spent my time playing with the little ones. We were playing with the dolls. It was so funny to watch them. The girls are so inventive. They put the babies on their backs and marched off to 'Bethlehem' (our nearest shopping town) to do their shopping. They turned little foam dominoes into cell phones which we all chatted through. It was particularly amusing when one of them named a dinosaur teddy 'baby Laura' - Laura is one of the leaders at Mapheo!

Although Mapheo is undoubtedly fun, it's also heartbreaking. This Wednesday I was working with the older ones doing their activity. I was sitting at a table of boys who are around 10 years old. I noticed that one boy was having trouble writing his name on his work. A Sotho helper wrote his name down for him to copy, but he couldn't even manage that. This is a boy of 10 who has been at school for probably 3 or 4 years. He's obviously got left behind at an early stage and the teacher can't be bothered or doesn't have the resources to help him. What hope will he have if that continues?

This Thursday I got soaked walking in the storm to Mapheo, I spent the next 3 hours there freezing cold. But I got a lift home and soaked in a hot bubble bath. The kids who came will have walked back to a home which is a shack or very basic building with no running water let alone a bath. They may not have a change of clothes to put on while the wet ones dry. They may not even have a bed. And there may well have been no dinner for them.

When you dwell on the desperate nature of their situations it can be overwhelming. They have been identified as the most vulnerable children in our community for any of a number of reasons - orphans, extreme poverty, child headed households, abuse, terminal illness, trauma, malnutrition, neglect. All we can do is show them the love Jesus commands us to and try to bring some kind of life education to try to equip them for adulthood. We pray that this will make a difference to their young lives.

The other things I will be focussing on are discipleship - I've been asked to help disciple the FYP girls who are here this year, Silver Hope and People of Hope. I'll write more about them another time.

I've also this week decided on somewhere to live. I'm moving into a little self-contained flat which is being built within the house of a couple from church. It will be ready at the beginning of March. I think it will be really nice. It has a lounge/kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. They are kitting it out for me so that I can just move straight in. It will be good to have the extra space of the lounge (everywhere else I looked at was just one room) as it will make it much easier for having people over, which I've decided is the way forward socially.

I'm refreshing my Sesotho skills. It's been amazing how much I remember. Unfortunately the lady who gave me lessons before is no longer teaching. I would love to find someone to give me some more lessons though. It's so frustrating not being able to communicate beyond niceties or conversations about illnesses. One day this week I came out of my house to find a small child (not unusual in itself - they play in the streets in the township all day) sobbing her heart out. I stopped and played with her a little bit until she cheered up, but I had no way of finding out what the problem was. She may have just been told off, but it could have been something so much worse & I couldn't find out. So I'm determined to get better. Thankfully the ladies at People of Hope basically refuse to speak in English to me so are forcing me to learn new things!

Anyway, ke tlamena ho tsamaya jwale (I must go now), salang hantle (goodbye).