Here are two donation options:

1.  We’ve added a printable form to fill out to make a donation in honour of someone (birthday gifts, in memoriam, etc)

2.  You can donate safely by mailing a cheque to our treasurer, Carol Schroeder at #15 – 900 43 Avenue, Vernon, BC V1T 9C8.

Check out both options at this page.

Susan joins in with the Gumboot Dancers in South Africa.

The Christmas party: singing that raised the roof! speeches, prayers, thank-you’s, and good-bye’s!

The gogos’ party took place inside the centre which had been transformed with white curtains & blue swags clothes-pegged in place, and a 10 foot pine tree decorated very effectively with balloons. An African Father Christmas passed out gifts to each and every one. This year the gogos received battery-less flashlights which operate with a shake.

 

Outside was the children’s party, music system blasting away, a decorated throne for Father Christmas under a growing tree also decorated in balloons, and general happy pandemonium.

 

 

 

Rev. Ginny Uren-Viner, with Ruth Magagula, Milly Chiloane, and Joy Burton took on a mammoth task of organization. They have worked tirelessly to make not only this party, but the entire project, a resounding success.

 

The 100 calendars from Grannies à Gogo, signed from so many Vernon area people, were a huge hit! They loved all the photos of themselves and carefully studied the photos of our group. They profusely thanked me and I made sure that they understood there are 150 members in Vernon who raise funds and love them, supported by a whole community.

Beauty Manzini presented Grannies à Gogo with a gorgeous Christmas banner which she made by hand using the paper piecing method. It will make a wonderful raffle item or perhaps a drawing card for our Pot-Luck and Auction. Regardless, what goes around, comes around, and all funds raised will all go back to the gogos.

This is the last of my blogs of this trip, as Ken and I head to Pemba in northern Mozambique for a few days, then to Washington, DC before home. Vernon’s Morning Star newspaper will be publishing two further articles; watch for them over the Christmas season.
“Salani kahle” ~ Susan

“Break the Silence – End the Violence” is the slogan of the country wide 16 Days of Activism which is running now from Nov.25 to Dec.10.  It focuses specifically on women’s and children’s rights (against abuse). South Africa has an excellent constitution but often people, particularly those in rural areas and those uneducated, don’t know their rights or how to find help.

Malindi Matsne is the councilor on the municipal government representing the township of Simile where the Sitabogogo Project is located.  She sat down to speak with the gogos (in an African language) about what this was all about, and to encourage them to come to a public presentation on the topic the following day.

I watched quietly from the sidelines, heartened to see and hear several of the gogos join in an animated discussion. It was also interesting to note those which gogos emerged as leaders in the discussion. Some who normally work quietly at their sewing spoke passionately with much hand waving.

When I drive in the car I always have the radio tuned to SAFM, similar to our CBC Radio, as a kind of pulse of the nation. In the last several days it has devoted a lot of time to this campaign, interviewing authors, filmmakers, victims and repentant abusers about this subject. I see a lot of forward movement in this country in many ways. (Now if only the government could get its act together).

I love to visit the orphan feeding project each time I come to Sabie. It feeds roughly 300 children twice a day, Monday to Friday. It’s not a part of the Sitabogogo project, but a number of the grandchildren that the gogos care for eat here. Zodwa Mkhonto and her unpaid volunteers are doing fantastic work, and this is one project I would love to see partnered with a Canadian support group.

With each visit I always notice changes – mostly encouraging, but they are not without their challenges. On my last visit I learned that, as their veggie garden was coming into full production, it was routinely raided. The night after they had finally laid down new copper water pipes, they were dug up and stolen. Recently a gov’t source of their funding dried up and they were down to their last few bags of meilie and were talking of shutting down. Unexpectedly, one of the grocery stores liquidated in Sabie and gave all their perishables to them – deus ex machina!

This time I had a big surprise. The children had apparently been preparing a program for their Christmas party and my visit prompted a dress rehearsal of their show. It was amazing – all kinds of dancing, singing, drama and poetry performance that went on for an hour and a half. Such talent, and it thrilled me! After some young boys did their gumboot demonstration, I jumped up and showed them 10 seconds worth of gumboot dance I knew, much to the surprise and amusement of all.

Since my last visit, they now have two young social workers who come for an hour or two in the afternoon to help children with their homework around a table in the kitchen. At the same time in the big hall, groups of kids practice dancing, singing and drama.

The big question that is only now beginning to be whispered in the wings of the world stage is this: As the gogo generation begins to pass away, the next huge social question looming on the horizon is that of the hurting, parentless orphans who are growing into the working and ruling generation. How will their experience shape the future of this country?

On Monday the gogos were decked out in the yellow T-shirts donated to them when they had their ball games in June, their red looped ribbons pinned on, long white candles in one hand, umbrellas in the other. At 10 am they were waiting for the bus to take them to the World AIDS Day rally due to start at 10:30. We waited and waited. “T.I.A.” as they say here – this is Africa.I made use of the time by whipping out my journal and interviewing 80 year old Emma Skosana, listening to her stories of losing all three of her children, and raising an adopted daughter. She ended up in Sabie in 1970 when the (apartheid) government took their house away and “made a coloured location there. Bantus were sent away”. Coloured refers to (East) Indians and mixed race, Bantu are black.

At 10:30 still no bus. Milly was on her cell phone and said don’t worry, they have not started without us. So relaxed is this ‘African Time’ . . . so foreign to my urgent sensibilities. At 11:15 the bus arrived and we were there in 15 minutes. True, it had not started.

The program was full of passionate speeches, singing and dancing by a number of groups. Sitabogogo sang an African hymn and This Little Lamp of Mine in English. Following this, the MC expressed surprise at the gogos’ strong, beautiful singing . . . “I did not expect that,” she said, as Milly translated in my ear.

 

A few gleanings from the Johannesburg Sunday Times:

Thirty studies have now indicated that circumcision halves the risk of contracting HIV for men and, since January, men are streaming in at the rate of 50 per day to one Johannesburg township clinic. It is funded by an agency from France.

South Africa HIV facts:
5.7 million people are HIV+, 11 % of the population
1,500 new infections every day
370,000 AIDS deaths a year; total deaths from AIDS = 2.5 million
30% of pregnant women are HIV+. 60,000 babies infected each year
470,000 receiving treatment
540,000 needing, but not receiving, treatment

For more details see: http://www.tac.org.za/community/

“This land is your land, this land is my land
From Pretoria, to Robben Island,
From the great Limpopo, to Atlantic waters,
This land is made for you and me.”

That’s my rewrite of the well known folk song, accompanied by an upbeat Trini Lopez version that my husband downloaded to a CD. Although I can dance up a storm, my singing voice is the pits, hence the CD for teaching purposes.

First I met with Ruth and one of the young Home Based Care women, Winnie, to give them the printed words and listen to the tune. They immediately began clapping the beat and moving their feet as we sang our way through. By the third time through they were singing in harmony, and after that they no longer needed the CD. Amazing how much better my voice sounded singing along with them! Then we set a few simple arm and feet movements to the chorus.

 The next day we team taught the song to about 30 gogos. Ruth and Winnie explained what the words meant and they all learned the English version. What a glorious sound they made! I couldn’t help but think what a tentative and thin sound a comparable group of Canadian grannies would make as they learned a new song in a foreign language. But of course, it’s cultural – they sing lustily and spontaneously many times a day. What fun!

 On World Aids Day, Monday, Dec. 1, I will be going with Sitabogogo to a big rally. Will report back on that experience next.

Tryphina Nkosi received a letter from her Vernon partner Janis Lauman. It included a photo of the potatoes Janis had harvested from her garden. Tryphina insisted (through an interpreter) that I come to her home on baking day so I could “shoot her” and give the photos to Janis in return.

A photo story . . .
We entered directly into the kitchen where Tryphina and her adult granddaughter, Victoria, had been baking for five hours.  A large vat of samp, a type of hard cracked corn, simmered on the stove.

 

In a corner a large bowl of dough was rising, swaddled in a green plastic bag, covered with blankets and topped off with newspapers. I suspect the dough would have risen without a single cover, judging by the heat and humidity in the small space. Tryphina bustled about, eager to show all the scones, ‘long doughnuts’, and buns in various stages of completion.

Victoria sat on a low bench mixing a large bowl of cream filling, and ruefully pointed to an electric mixer that was broken.

And the reason for all this energetic activity? The next day was pension day, when she and Victoria sell their products to the elderly lined up to collect their pensions.

Tryphina sliced open a long john, piped in some cream filling and handed it to me. Not exactly Food Safe certified, but fatteningly yummy nevertheless. I did pay her the 3 rands (40 cents) she would normally charge for it.     

The next day as I came into the township, I walked amongst dozens of locals selling their wares on spread blankets, including Tryphina Nkosi and friends.

(A personal side note about Tryphina: she is raising two orphaned grandchildren, and last Friday one of them, a teen-ager, went to buy bread at 9 pm. He was robbed of his cell phone (everyone here carries cell phones) and shot in the foot. He is still in hospital and it appears the bullet will not be removed. The police have the culprit.)

On sewing day the Ubuntu Community Care Centre is just a-humming. I actually intend that description as a double entendre – one of the many things I love about the African people is the way they uninhibitedly sing (or hum) wherever they feel like it. The worker stocking grocery shelves will break into song, or the server in a restaurant when she’s not busy waiting tables, or the gardener pulling weeds and pruning bushes (no, they’re not plugged into ipods).

So about 35 gogos were very pre-occupied with their current sewing project, chatting, singing, comparing their products, as a few of their grandchildren played about. They are working on English paper piecing, taught to them by Cherryl Taylor, an American who has been living in Sabie for the past three years. Joy Burton, who assists Ginny frequently, helps to cut out the hexagonal pieces, and the gogos hand stitch them over paper before piecing them carefully together in starburst patterns. They will be giving a number of them to me to carry back for the Grannies à Gogo handicraft group to use in their creations, which in turn will raise funds to be sent back to Sitabogogo. A wonderful full-circle effect.

Since I was last here 9 months ago, I can see that they’ve settled into their sewing routines. They assist each other by cutting fabric for those with trembling arthritic hands, or threading needles for those with poor eyesight. It’s also good to see many of them now wearing reading glasses as a result of our collecting blitz last spring which rounded up about 45 pairs of glasses. Sewing is clearly a very popular activity, and they are stretching their creativity, using the starburst patchwork product to appliqué on to cushion covers, table runners, and wall hangings. I suspect some of their handiwork will show up at our annual Pot Luck & Auction in February.

Kruger Park is a marvelous escape. It’s only an hour’s drive from Sabie to the nearest gate of this 150 km long wildlife sanctuary. Ken and I hadn’t planned to go this time, but made a rather spontaneous decision that we needed a day off. My expectations were not high – we’ve been there dozens of times, often staying over in a camp for two or three days, so I did not expect to have many sightings in a day trip. Wrong!! 

We saw the usual kudus, giraffes, wildebeest, baboons, elephants, waterbuck, zebras, African buffalo,

On another note, I’m currently reading “The Betrayal of Africa” by Canadian author Gerald Caplan. It is a slim little volume that packs a huge punch as the author analyzes why the African continent is in such a mess. It’s an excellent resource for getting a concise background on the political and social issues.