HNO opened on the 9^th to welcome the hot and dry days of mid summer.  We are missing Kgumamang and Teboho who have been enrolled in a special school in Harding, and when I say special, I mean special.  This school deals with physically disabled children who are able to follow the normal school curriculum, and the quality of this school absolutely knocked us off our perches.  Being rather possessive about our children we were very worried about sending them away but once we saw the quality, care and love of the staff and the lovely amenities(even a swimming pool) we were so happy that they accepted our two children after having them assessed.  Although Kgumamang especially will need extra academic help we do believe that he will gain tremendously from being in a “normal” school.  We keep phoning to check how they are but we need not worry as they have adapted well.

Back in Bulwer we have admitted four more disabled children into our day care centre so the year has started off with a bang. One of the big new developments is the forming of a very special friendship with a very special lady. Sandy van Rensburg is a qualified teacher and has offered her services in setting up the crèche and preschool curriculum for the year.  She joins us approximately once a week and has been teaching Madlamini who, with fear and trembling, took over the role as crèche teacher from Nomfundo. But as Sandy has guided and worked with her, her confidence is growing. Madlamini has no teaching experience or training, can speak some basic English and has been thrown into the deep end. But with good guidance she is proving very clearly that this job can be done, and done well.

This is proving to be a very good experiment in taking rural women and training them to successfully run rural crèches. To this end HNO is embarking on workshops to assist women in the running of rural crèches. Our first workshop is on the 24^th of January when we hope to reach out to 6 “teachers” to equip them with the skills they need to run crèches that will benefit the children to the maximum in preparation for formal education.  Once again Sandy will be running these workshops and her enthusiasm and energy has left us all panting.  She has managed to motivate many of her friends in sponsoring a “box” of basic necessities for a crèche, such as crayons, scissors, paint, paper, brushes etc, which she has sourced and put together herself. Most of these crèches do not have any of those resources, so we are very grateful for the sponsorship. I personally visited these community crèches last year and so am very aware of the dire needs both in resources and training and so we are really looking forward to the 24^th to get this programme off the ground.

We had hardly opened our doors when Nina Rohland from Tingasmart arrived armed with three DVD players.  She had promised to get these for us in the new year, and as we discovered after the way she stepped in to “take over” our Christmas party in December, when she says she will do something, she does it.  Thanks to her and Tingasmarts generosity we now have music in the disability crèche,  the ECD crèche and in the main hall where the more severely disabled children receive their therapy. This one is also connected to a TV and sometimes we show children’s programmes like “Barney”.  Nkosinathi is a young man who is absolutely addicted to music.  He always has to have a musical toy with him, (which costs us a fortune in batteries) and he has really taken to the DVD player. See the pic below. He just loves it. We also have a blind girl, Nomvula, who benefits greatly from the music but then again, who doesn’t ? Music is good for the soul, no matter who you are.

Nina, thank you, thank  you, thank you.

We are deeply grateful to Hilfer fur Esinqobile who have faithfully sponsored some of our disabled children over the years, but this year they sent us an extra gift of money over and above and it has been such a great help with the finances as we kick into the new year.  This group of people from Germany have shown their love and compassion for our children not only in funding but also in keeping up with their progress and well being. We send them reports on each child and so it really is a very personal and intimate involvement.

Well I know January is already come and gone so I will say au revoir and will promise to send the February newsletter before that month runs away with us as well.

Lots of love from all of us to all of you

Conny