Bana ba tsebo

To close off 2024, I recruited a crew of my cousins, nieces, nephews and their future uncle, Mo, to help me with an important project. Othandweni Family Care Centre is a children’s home in Mofolo South, Soweto. The facility takes care of about 90 kids who are orphaned or undergoing legal issues. I have previously done work with the facility in 2021, collecting money from friends to buy Christmas lunch and party pack supplies and getting my family to chip in with other goodies too and also recruiting Mo and the little helpers to do some work as well. It was a rather small project, but it left a great impact for a day that is generally filled a lot of joy for so many of us. Christmas, for me, has consistently been a joyous day filled with the laughter of my many  nieces and nephews, the cheers of my cousins and siblings and the prayers of my mom, aunts and uncles…very high on joy!

Last year, in October, I started dreaming up ideas on how to end the year off on a high note and concluded on running a book collection drive across my social and professional networks. The first targeted donors were Mo and our friends, who we celebrated our engagement with in early November, the braai invite requested a new or used book as “damage”. Up next, I put a box out at the office asking my colleagues to drop off new and/ or used books. In addition, I asked for cash donations as an alternative to books so that my team and I could buy party packs supplies and underwear (an often-neglected donation item). A special shout-out to Mo’s yogi, Brigitta, who also stumbled upon the book drive items in our apartment and volunteered book donations unsolicited!! All in all, we collected 80+ books and R4,425 cash – WHAT A FEAT!!!

On December 28^th, our Dream Team of 12 met at Othandweni around 11:30 am and together with a handful of the Centre’s preteens cleaned, dusted, coordinated their library. This was honestly a much larger task than I had initially anticipated, hence the need for extra hands. I was enthused at first, motivating the troops by pointing out all the good we’ll be doing and how impactful this could be for the Centre’s children who live in such vulnerable circumstances…making them understand just how privileged we are to be able to choose to do that for people in need. However, after a few shelves left my cleaning cloths blackened from dust, I felt overwhelmed. I remember turning to my cousins, eyes widened and saying “this is a lot”.

Othandweni itself has an impressive library; as we removed stacks and stacks of books to dust and clean the shelves we came across great stories and novels we ourselves have read from the Chronicles of Narnia, to the Disney classics (The Lion King, Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid etc), to a few of Shakespeares’ classic plays…all the while discussing which ones were our favourites, which ones we would recommend or completely miss. My personal favourite moment there was the consensus in the room that Romeo and Juliet was just really a terrible story (I remember reading that play in high school and being so disillusioned, thinking, “what was all the hype about??”). Given that the Center is quite endowed in the literary department, we decided that the donated books will be handed over to their sister organisation, Masibambisane Centre, in Eldorado Park, Johannesburg to help them build a collection of their own and spread the joy and impact of reading to more children in need.