Hope for the future

On Wednesday 31 March 2021, volunteers from our Safe Haven Project handed over donations worth €3.800. The fundraising started as an original initiative by our very own Safe Haven volunteers. They saw a need for the donation when they discovered that the local day-care centre where they were volunteering at faced financial issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the parents of the children could not afford to pay full school fees.

Our volunteers have been volunteering at a day-care centre located in Langa, Cape Town since January this year. The name Langa in IsiXhosa means “sun” and the township exists since 1927 and provides many homeless people with a safe haven. Langa has produced some prominent figures in sport and entertainment and boasts with a number of notable residents. Even though the township has existed for nearly a century, many of its inhabitants still experience poverty.

Given the circumstances the day-care and parents found themselves in, our volunteers saw the opportunity to help. The volunteers then got involved with friends and family members in the Netherlands and everyone quickly assisted to raise funds to the value of €3.800. The amount raised was then used to purchase stationery for the children, toys, additional mattresses and blankets. The volunteers also saw a need for the school to be provided with a brand new laptop and an industrial photocopy machine as well as the installation of Wi-Fi.

Before these machines were received, staff of the day-care centre had to go to the nearest shopping mall to print letters, documents for the parents and booklets for the children which took a lot of time and money. Thanks to the volunteers, they can now print documents, letters and booklets of a variety of paper size and there is no more need to run to the nearest internet shop.

On the donation handover day, the volunteers organised a party for the children at the day care centre. They were provided with warm Happy Meals, the children had their face painted by the volunteers and the event ended with volunteers and children singing and dancing.

We would like to thank our volunteers who are so passionately involved in making their time available to volunteer at the day-care centre and secondly and we especially thank them for their incredible gesture and hard work for the funds raised with their friends and family members over such a short period of time.

This donation was very much needed and appreciated by the project and the project staff acknowledges that it changed their lives as well as the lives of the children at the day-care centre.

Yours,
Edward Julius (Support Coordinator)
The Good Hope Volunteer Team

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