A new year and a new start for Isibani. A long time has passed since the last newsletter and a lot has changed here in Winterton, it is difficult to know where to start.

 

Building works have now been completed so we have a wonderful site to serve our community with. Not all buildings have been allocated to projects yet but they are ready and waiting for volunteers to help us to initiate new projects.

 

There have been significant changes in staff. All except one home based carer have left us, 3 being asked to leave and 1 leaving to start her own business.

 

In summary our team consists of Sofi, Coordinator and originator overseeing the running of the whole place; Anne (volunteer from UK) Running the Baby Day Care available for working mums, doing much of our financial bookwork and now starting a “Safe House”, Nicola who has just commenced literacy courses, Rodrick dealing with youth programs, Cindy our one remaining home based carer, Sylvester responsible for maintenance, Jana who is doing Physiotherapy with adults and children, Kerry who is now full time doing Occupational Therapy. Recent additions are Hlo (Sofi’s foster son) who is helping out with the kitchen project amongst other things and Mary Pat a Peace Corps Volunteer who will live in a village and work to address HIV/Aids issues and support the projects.

 

We started 2010 with a workshop to help us understand our vision; I think we all agreed that was 2 days very well spent. As a centre we are much clearer now about what we can achieve and what we want to achieve. It can be difficult to reflect on the past but we did this (not without a few tears!) and emerged after two days with renewed hope for a sustainable community centre.

 

In the period since the centre opened it seemed to run away all on its own, we did our best to help every person walking through the door with a whole range of problems, this if we are honest resulted in us doing lots of things but not always as well as we should have. Our new vision is to serve the community as best we can by providing fewer services but to a much higher standard.

 

The community is constantly changing, Khetani (our local township) has doubled in size over the last few months as the government has continued to build more “one room” houses. A larger community brings with it more problems and we are in constant battle with a community who appear to have lost all moral values, a community where drink, drugs, rape, domestic violence are common place. There is no respect for one another, no trust and no dream for the future.

 

The changing needs of the community together with our understanding of our own vision has helped us to start this new year with determination albeit with a much smaller team of volunteers. Our objective now is to partner with other organizations to help us meet the needs of community.

 

Everything we do is ultimately to help the community in the long term, to make the community sustainable and to offer long term solutions to problems. We want to restore a value system back into the community and whilst we appreciate this is a huge task we as always do our best!!