It was great to see the Care Workers, Khetiwe, Virginia and Marie, as well as Lucia, a new edition to the team, at Mafambisa. They were so welcoming and pleased to see us.
With the restriction on teams in ‘23 we were unable to send a team from Biggleswade. However, my daughter, Alice, had volunteered to be a teacher in a school near Durban for a year, so I travelled alone to South Africa to visit Alice and at the same time make a visit to the Hands at Work Hub and to our partner community.
I flew to Johannesburg and then onto Durban. It was school holidays in South Africa, so we were able to visit a few places before we set out to drive across the country to the Hub. We stopped off at the Nelson Mandela ‘capture’ site, which was the place where they first arrested Nelson Mandela and where he began his 27-year incarceration.
There is a very special memorial sculpture here and also a museum tracing his incredible life. A little fact we learnt is that when they stopped his car Nelson was sitting in the front, wearing a chauffeur’s uniform, and his driver was in the back as a passenger. Just one way that Nelson had avoided capture for 17 months!
We arrived at the Hands at Work Hub and the very next day were off to Mafambisa. It was great to see the children’s shelter completed; last year our team painted several coats of white and then blue paint, but we didn’t have time to do the mosaic design at the bottom – this was done a week after we left!
When we arrived, Virginia, Khetiwe and Lucia were all there. We went straight into chopping vegetables and stirring the pap – it was as if we had never been away!
Before long we set off on a Holy Home Visit – well two actually. Alice went with Khetiwe and Lucia while I went with Audrey to visit Sam, a young lad of 18 who has been coming to the Care Point for years, but recently has fallen in with a bad crowd.
Audrey, Sam and I sat under a tree and chatted. It was great to get to know Sam a little bit. In his last year of school, Sam dreams of being an airline pilot, and this gave us a chance to talk about the pitfalls of getting in with the wrong crowd, and avoiding being an innocent party caught up in an incident.
Both Audrey and I assured Sam of our love and prayers, and our trust. Sam shared that he spends time at a recording studio, where he sets poetry to music. He was able to share some with me, and it sounded great!
Alice writes about her visit:
It was another first on this home visit. We went to a home that we first visited last year. It was lovely to be able to go back and visit a young mother who last year was 16 and had just had a baby four weeks previously.
This is the blog entry from July 2022
Everything had moved on. The baby is now 12 months old and the mum 17 years old. They were living in the same home with her siblings and grandmother. The younger siblings sell crisps and narchies (satsumas) to the neighbours to raise money for food. Mum and baby are doing well and continue to be supported by the Care Workers (particularly Maria) and the Care Point. They still visit the Care Point most days and mum has gone back to school, which was a hope of hers last year. It was clear from being in this home and community that the phrase “it takes a community to raise a child” is very evident here.
Both of these visits helped us to realise the importance of partnership and of the value of getting to know a community, getting to know the Care Workers by visiting them regularly, sharing with them, going deeper.
Holy Home Visits over, we went back to the Care Point where the children were arriving. As it was school holidays, the numbers were down, but there was still plenty of singing and worship before we served the food.
It was a great first day and during the week we made three further trips to Mafambisa, just being there and walking alongside them. On one of the days we took along some nail polish and painted the Care Workers’ nails – always something that goes down really well! We had a great time out in the community, we shared with the Care Workers, we showed love, we visited homes and renewed friendships, we laughed, we sang, we worshipped, we played, we learnt, we were humbled. Our partnership grew.
The rest of the week was taken up with Youth Camp. This was a first in Africa for both Alice and me. They arrived on Monday evening, one group from Pfunani and one from Sommerset – thirty-five in all. We joined in with their worship and we helped organise games and activities. ‘Stand on a chair’ basketball was a favourite and building the highest free-standing structure using marshmallows and macaroni was competitive, exciting and a lot of fun. We really enjoyed Youth Camp. It was great to see the young people learning, worshipping and having fun together. Our final Friday was their final Friday, and it was a privilege to listen to them feed back at the end of their week.
It was very different visiting the Hub with just the two of us, instead of leading a team, but it was a real chance to catch up with long-term volunteers. It was great to be able to renew our links with the children, young people and Care Workers at Mafambisa, and really impressed upon us the need for teams and the need to establish strong partnerships. Being part of Youth Camp was a real privilege, and it was wonderful to witness this strand of Hands at Work’s outreach.
Alice & Chris Parker