Volunteers

Since our last newsletter we have been rejoined by Rodrick who left us for 6 months to undertake a discipleship training course in Cape Town. He returned to us in January and is working primarily on Matthew 25 (feeding scheme) producing profiles of our clients to help us to better understand their needs. He is also providing spiritual care to any of our clients who are interested in this.

Hlo is no longer volunteering full time with us but still pops in from time to time to help us to mend things!

Oversees volunteers

Lisa and Miriam, our German volunteers are around half way through their year with us and are a tremendous help to the centre. Lisa is working at our baby day care facility and Miriam is working with Mzi to facilitate the intake of new babies and also working in the community to get more children into school.

Rosemary, from Australia, has joined us for a year and has been a huge asset to the team already. Working with Iben, a Danish volunteer, they have cleared, sorted and organized our entire distribution centre, a job which has defeated many other people over the months. It seems their determination and unwavering enthusiasm has been very effective.(See also section on charity shop)

Noreen and two of her children, Lochlainn and Sinead have also been with us for a month already with another couple of weeks to go. Noreen is a massage therapist and has been giving treatments to lots of our clients which they have found immensely useful. Lochlainn has been very helpful in fixing anything and everything around the centre and Sinead has been an immense help at baby day care and with other jobs around the centre.

Isibani Uniform

We now have Isibani t-shirts enabling us to be easily identified in the community and in particular on clinic days and pension days when there are hundreds of people around. We have received lots of positive comments about our new uniform so thanks to Sofi for choosing the colour (.. purple) much to the disgust of our male volunteers !!

Charity Shop

Since opening the Isibani centre we have received many donated clothes and other goods; we often find we have a surplus of some items but never have enough of others; children’s clothes a continual problem for us. With this in mind we have decided to open a charity shop on site at Isibani.

We will continue to offer emergency relief and hope that the charity shop will serve the dual purpose of raising funds for the centre as well as providing affordable clothes and goods to our local community.

School Uniform

The start of the new school year brought with it an influx of families needing help with school clothes and shoes. Thanks to a previous donation from Winterton Methodist church and a couple of local donors we have been able to equip around 20 children with the uniforms they need to attend school.

It is a sad fact that despite the financial situation of a family every child must have the exact uniform demanded by their school. Children without the correct uniform will not be allowed to attend. Some schools even go so far as to insist on a particular brand of shoe (naturally their chosen brand is the most expensive)

This is a constant source of frustration for us but is also something we are not in a position to influence at this time.

Special Needs

We continue to offer monthly cerebral palsy support groups which are a huge success thanks to a local CP therapist, Selena, who volunteers her time each month.

We are also continuing with our special needs day where therapists come together to offer treatments; we have occupational therapists, physiotherapists and a representative from the department of education who assists in placing the children into suitable schools.

We have had huge success with this programme and have successfully placed 4 children into schools so far.

Matthew 25

This feeding scheme currently supports around 150 families and the role of Isibani is to accept families onto the scheme and to work with them to access grants and / or provide health support to enable them to return to work.

Sadly due to the demand for help our stocks and cash reserves are at an all time low and we anticipate that we will run out completely within around 6 weeks. The maize is donated by local farmers as they harvest their crops but harvesting is not due to start until mid May so we will almost certainly face a couple of months with no supplies.

We are using this opportunity to redesign the scheme and are currently asking families to voluntarily remove themselves if they know there are other families in a worse position than they are. We are also designing a scheme to encourage those in need of maize to offer themselves as volunteers at Isibani and thus giving something back into their community. We hope that donors seeing this initiative will be more inclined to donate.

Our current ideas are to ask for help with gardening, kitchen duties, painting and recycling.

Recycling

We have identified a local recycling company who have provided us with bags and scales and hope to get our recycling programme up and running very soon.

We are linking this scheme to Matthew 25 and will ask our clients to bring in bags of recyclable materials as a contribution towards their food parcels.

In addition we hope to involve the local schools and are confident that this scheme will lead to a much cleaner community. The recycling company will pay for the things we collect so this provide a source of income for anyone collecting for us.

Baby Day Care

This facility had a difficult start to the year but what initially seemed like a crisis actually turned out to be a blessing. Our two staff members both resigned at about the same time in Janaary, both of them choosing to go on to further their education. Whilst this created something of an immediate problem we were quickly able to find two replacements who are ideally suited for the role.

The babies have never been so happy, or so plentiful (we have around 20 babies now) with even more wanting after care from 12:30 when the crèche closes. We have started a waiting list of babies and hope to get more volunteers soon so we can continue to provide this important service.

The aim of this facility is not just “baby minding”; we are very aware that we actually spend more time with these babies than their parents do so we offer them stimulation, assistance with health issues and progress reports to the parents. We have regular contact with the parents and work with them to resolve any other issues at home that we become aware of.

Thanks to Triss Beckers and funders from Belgium (www.tomorrow4isibani.be) we are able to keep this facility going, Triss has been very successful in fundraising and we now have enough money to supply the babies with milk each day to supplement the food they bring from home.

For the first time since baby day care opened all the parents paid their fees the day after being asked; this clearly shows that the parents are very happy with the facility and the care their children receive.

Health

A lot of our day to day work still concerns health problems and we have 2 volunteers who concentrate on this side of our service (Mafika and Sbonello). They conduct daily home visits on clients we know are sick; they are able to give advice and support about treatment as well as changing dressings and assessing wounds.

Mafika and Sbo are well known in the community are often receive referrals as they travel around the location; they are easily identified now in their purple t-shirts.

Clinic

We are still in discussions with the Department of Health but hope to be allowed to open a clinic onsite at Isibani. We would refurbish and equip the chosen buildings (as far as possible) and the department would supply nurses and staff. It would be a pre-requisite of the agreement that Isibani could also supply a manager so that we could monitor and control the standard of service offered. There was a budget for a clinic to be opened in the Khetani location but due to various misappropriations there is now a freeze on capital expenditure for the next 10 years!!

HIV Testing

Sindi assisted by Nicola with Mzie, Mafika and Sibonello for back up offer HIV testing on a drop in basis. We are pleased to say that we are gradually becoming known as a HIV testing centre and will soon have a huge sign outside our gates so no-one will be in any doubt that HIV testing is available at Isibani.

With the help of a local nurse, Sue Stockhill, we are continuing to offer HIV testing onsite at places of work and there has already been interest from a few local employers. We have at least 3 farm bookings over the next few weeks.

Since starting with HIV testing we have tested over 340 people; the infection rate of those tested has been 28% and 72% negative. This is not typical of the infection rate overall.

We owe huge thanks to an overseas donor who donated the funds for us to buy a CD4 count machine. This will enable us to do blood tests on patients and get the results within just 20 minutes. Patients otherwise have to travel to their local hospital and results often go missing or take weeks to be returned.

This amazing machine will allow us to get patients onto the ARV medication much sooner as well as saving them costly and lengthy trips to the hospital.

School programmes

We were disappointed to hear from the nurse in the local clinic (run from Winterton pharmacy) is seeing an increasing number of school children (mainly girls) coming in with various STIs. It seems that the message concerning safe sex is not being adhered to and the young girls are feeling very pressured by their boyfriends to enter into sexual relationships.

To address this we will run a series of workshops in the local schools to further explain the health risks of unprotected sex and also to address social and moral values. We will update you again about this programme.

Career Advising

Isibani is privileged to have such a dedicated team of volunteers. We are never really sure how we attract them but somehow we do. Having said this Isibani does not provide careers for people, we do not pay wages and are only able to offer a small token of thanks each month for the work that the volunteers do.

A local farmer, Peter DuPriet, is now working with us to offer career advice to our volunteers and a few other members of the community. He ran an introductory workshop and this is being followed up with one to one sessions to establish potential career paths for each of our team. He will help them to find information about training courses, jobs with training provided and possibly access to bursaries.

Whilst losing any of our volunteers will leave a gap in our team we wish them all the very best with their future career paths and hope that their time at Isibani will provide useful as they eventually move onto new things.

Kitchen and garden

We now have a fully equipped kitchen and are able to provide food for:

• Special needs day and Cerebral palsy support group

• Clinic staff on clinic day (twice per month)

• Sick members of the community

• Children in crèche or baby day care without food

• Matthew 25 clients on the day they collect food parcels

• Zulu speaking Sunday school run by Arina (local post mistress)

The garden is doing well but we sometimes struggle to keep in under control. We are hoping for a volunteer to come along and take it under their wing.

Adult Literacy

Last year Nicola was running English classes for Zulu speakers but most of her class from last year have moved out of the area or have other commitments now so are no longer able to attend. This class hasn’t been re-established yet this year.

Nicola, however, now runs a Zulu class for English speakers which is a lot of fun. I attend this class myself but yesterday when trying to enquire about Sylvester’s foot which he had hurt the day before managed to ask “Where is the foot?” rather than “How is the foot?” This created raucous laughter amongst the Zulu speakers but I will keep trying.

Social Worker Programme

It is sad to report that we continue to come across many children in abusive or vulnerable home situations; this is compounded by very few resources available from the government to deal with these cases. There are very few places for these children to be placed and mostly they are all full. There is only one social worker allocated for our area and her case load is so overwhelming she is unable to be at all effective.

The good news is that Triss (www.tomorrow4isibani.be) has accessed funding for us to employ our own social worker to work alongside the government social worker. We have drafted a job specification and will be advertising the post very soon. We envisage that having our own social worker will enable the prompt placement of children into loving and nurturing homes. The social worker’s role will be to find suitable foster families (in community not institutions) and to deal with all the necessary paperwork to get the children placed.

The social worker will also run training programmes for foster families and offer counseling and support to the children. We have funding for this post for one year but will update you again on the progress of this programme.

Conclusion

So as you can see we have been very busy. We would like to offer our thanks to everyone who continues to support us with their donations, their time and their ongoing interest in our community and projects.

We are blessed to be supported by so many people from all over the world.

Our local community is continuing to grow and with it the needs of the people living here. We are often asked what specific projects we are looking to fundraise for, so we have prepared a wish list which we hope you will find useful.
 
In addition we have highlighted a couple of 'sponsorship' opportunities to support particular individuals.
 
Do keep in touch and feel free to pass on news of our work at Isibani to others.
 
Best wishes
 
The Team at Isibani