Jeanette Verster Photography

I’ve really had quite a run of charity work lately.  This is the last for this year though.  A colleague told us about this creche in Soweto that was started by an amazing lady, and as a result of what we found out about it, we also collected toys and clothes for this school.  I went with 2 of my colleagues to deliver the goods and see the place for ourselves.  My car was so full of stuff, and the roads were so very bad that I actually almost rolled the car on the way to the school.  But anyhoo, that’s enough of me, this lady’s story is incredible!

I’m going to give you a quick recap of Nthabiseng’s history, because the whole story, especially the details of the abuse is too terrible to repeat on my blog.

Mme Dimpho (as she’s known in the area) was one of 3 children.  Her parents died when they were young and they lived in aunts and uncles home cleaning and cooking for them until her brother was old enough to look after them.  She never went to school.  He made her marry someone when she was 15 and she had 3 kids. She eventually got a job as a cleaner in Rand Mutual hospital and then started training as a nurse, until the hospital closed down when the mine closed.

One day she was at home, when a man came to her house with a baby who was very hot.  She tried to bring the fever down, but it didn’t work.  Eventually she took the child to Baragwanath where the doctors examined the 9 month old and discovered that she had been sexually abused.  The baby eventually died from her injuries and the father of the baby was never found.

That incident made Nthabiseng decide to start a daycare instead of just sitting around the house waiting for a job.

The daycare centre is in the area where she lived.  It’s in a low-cost housing and shack dwellers area called Doornkop which is on the West side of Soweto.  The centre cares for 130 children between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.

The school is not the only thing that she does in the community.  She runs a feeding scheme from the creche for 15 granny headed households where the parents have died and the grannies can’t get government grants because they can’t get ID documents (one of the households she feeds has a granny with 8 kids).  She also fosters 8 children at her house and she can’t get grants for them either.

It’s pity the school was closed for our visit, but she said that because most of the parents don’t work at Christmas time, she can’t get paid at all; so she doesn’t have the money to run the school and feed everyone once a day for this month.  And she needs to have the buildings repaired over this time too, as the kids have broken windows and there’s a lot of damp on the walls of the one classroom.  Let me take you on a tour:

This building built by FNB houses the kitchen, and then a room which serves as an office, sickroom and the guard room (there’s a guard that sleeps there at night), and also a room which is the nursery for 12 babies.

This classroom is the older kids class.  There are 35 kids in that class

This room serves as an office, a sickroom and at night it’s transformed into a guard house where the guard sleeps

Other than the 2 yellow buildings, and the loos, and one prefab building that serves as another classroom; all the other buildings on the premises are shacks that have been built as classrooms or storage rooms.

And finally her amazing veggie garden which stretched the length of the property.  She feeds all the children (and she teaches them how to grow them) and the feeding scheme households with her veggies.  She picked some spinach for my colleagues to take home.

These kids arrived while we were leaving, and were hoping for a bite to eat.  As you can see by the clothes, it was a crazy cold day today.. which is mad considering it’s the middle of summer.

And that’s it… I’m going to make a plan to get there when the school opens again next year to see this place alive.