An island of hope in a sea of need

A BEACON OF HOPE
We’ve all seen the statistics, we’ve heard of child-headed households, and we know AIDS is a tragedy ripping communities apart. But you don’t fully appreciate the reality of this until you stand before a boy trying to be a man, a boy who has had to contemplate life without anyone - just a little brother and sister totally dependant on him. He knows that his mother, the only person he has left to turn to, is gravely ill, and the unbearably heavy burden of his future has given him the eyes of a grown man.

“Sifiso* calls to me during the night,” says his mother, Theresa*. “He asks, ‘Ma, are you still alive?’”

“I don’t know what will happen when I am gone,” she sobs.

This is the stark reality faced by many people in France, a sprawling suburb of small government-built houses bordering the Edendale valley just outside Pietermaritzburg. The scale of this development is surprising; over 5 000 tightly packed together little homes, each housing an average of six people, swarms over the hillsides. It’s a sprawling mass of humanity that includes some of the poorest in the city. And there is virtually no infrastructure like shops, crèches or clinics. Of the approximately 1 800 pupils in the suburb’s school, at least 300 are orphans.
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France centre a beacon of hope – 2/3
But in the midst of this sea of tin roofs and grey concrete, a patch of green stands like an island on the floor of the valley. This is the site of the soon-to-be-built France Community Facility Centre, a project co-ordinated by the Reach Out Foundation and involving a team of sponsors that include Liberty Properties, which has contributed R2,4 million to the centre’s development, and the award winning Grinaker-LTA, sponsoring time and expertise as the main contractor. This state-of-the-art centre will offer a wide range of services to this community. The drop-in centre will have a community room, social worker’s office, laundry, kitchen and clinic, as well as a child advocacy centre to support, counsel and protect children. A number of other services are also envisaged, including a crèche, an education and training facility, and a pension payout point.

It is a beacon of hope to thousands here.

“I can’t go to hospital because there is nobody to look after my children,” says Theresa. Thin and frail, and suffering from tuberculosis and symptoms of Aids, she can do little for herself. Her 13-year-old son looks after her.

“Sifiso baths me and makes the food for the children and looks after them,” she explains.

But when he is at school she has to try cope alone with her 3-year-old-son, who has special skin and eyesight needs due to albinism.

“Last week I fell and cut my head. The ambulance came and took me to hospital, and my small one was left alone.”
“He played outside by himself all day and he was asleep on the grass when I came back.”
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France centre a beacon of hope – 3 last
It’s a scenario that is almost unbelievable to many of us, but in France such hardships are cold fact for Theresa and many destitute people like her. The Community Centre could be a lifesaver for Theresa. Its clinic, serviced by the Department of Health will almost certainly provide life-saving healthcare for her; its soup kitchen will supplement the meagre potato and onion diet her little family subsists on now; and the laundry facility and homework support service that is to be offered by this centre will help Theresa’s children until she is well enough to take over these duties again. The education and training facility could give Sifiso the leg-up he needs to one day make this brave boy a leader in his community.

This community centre is a hand reaching out to the most desperate, those who just cannot help themselves, and it is one of those projects that makes a tangible difference in society as a whole. For Theresa’s family and others like them it is a chance at an almost normal life. For many more it is their only hope.