The Africa Project

Megan MacDonald a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar from the USA and now in Kenya put me onto this organisation via her wonderful blog site called There She Goes. Megan is one amazing lady and I met her briefly at the Los Angeles Rotary International Convention or was it Chicago? Megan is doing great work in my old home Kenya however this story is about South Africa.

It is about child headed households of orphans who are victims of AIDS. These are the children we in RFFA are helping with our Orphan Rescue Kits especially in Kenya.

One by One

By Peggy Goetz, Africa Unfinished

Some days I cannot see any
hope for Africa, the leaky human
ship of it. When one tiny hole
is patched a fist blow breaks another,
desperate baling by sucking in
one noxious mouthful at a time
and spewing it overboard.
Some days I cannot see any
hope for Africa.

Then I see a face, a smile,
a child who studies hard,
a doctor who returns to help
her village, a principal who
lets his students sleep on
the floor of his modest home
because they live too far,
a nun who’s worked here
half a century still laboring
every day, a young woman who’s
kept her four sisters safe and fed
after both parents died of AIDS.
There is hope for Africa,
one person at a time.

The Africa Project founded in 2005 as an all volunteer non profit organization, The Africa Project is making a real difference in the lives of children and families in Nkandla, South Africa, where extreme poverty is exasperated by the HIV pandemic and extremely drug resistant tuberculosis. Nkandla has a population of 133,602 of whom 57 percent are women. An estimated 90 percent of the population are unemployed and the majority of households are headed by women. Over 61 percent of the population consists of children under 18 years of age and 14 percent are under 5 years, placing a high dependency burden on a relatively small group of adult earners.

orphans of nkandla, bbc – cinematography from Natalie Haarhoff on Vimeo.