Project HOPE UK's director heads to South Africa

Paul Brooks, Project HOPE UK's executive director, is off to South Africa this weekend to review progress on The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville.
Since its launch last year, The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville has staged several major events such as the Children's World Cup, the Tshepo festival at Christmas and the Munsieville's Got Talent contest, which have all helped to raise awareness of the programme in the community. Behind the scenes, committees for the seven 'hubs' of the Thoughtful Path have been formed, and the site of the Resource Centre has been agreed with the local council. The first group of carers have started their Early Childhood Development training, and the Youth Journalism Academy has been established with support from Silverstar Casino.
During Paul's visit to Munsieville, he will meet with the hub committees and community leaders to plan next steps for the programme, helping to transform the lives of the orphans and other vulnerable children in the township.
Check back next week for updates from his trip.

ECD training gets underway

Five ladies from Munsieville are now in week three of their training to become qualified Early Childhood Development practitioners, enabling them to make radical changes to the pre-school experience of the young children in their care.
The training will lead to internationally recognised qualifications in ECD, and ongoing mentoring and resources will help them to run programmes which will have an enormous beneficial impact on the children and the whole community.
In addition, the first of a number of model ECD centres will be opened soon in Munsieville, to help inspire and train other carers and to provide a safe and stimulating environment for the children.
Find out more about our ECD programme here, and join our CIP to help support this life-changing initiative.
Thanks for reading!

Youth Voice Journalism project launches sister academy

This week has been an exciting one for the young people of Munsieville as The Youth Voice Journalism Project excitingly opened a sister academy in neighbouring township Swanieville, benefitting another group of 20 youngsters alongside Munsieville. The digital camera equipment is also winging its way to South Africa, ready for the launch next week.

I also got a thank you from the staff at Thuto Lefa high school for the Connecting Continents schools exchange programme. The website is in production and all six schools are busy writing their pen-pal letters. We also had a good success this week with the district council, who are helping with trees and seedlings for a greening project in the informal settlement. This will eventually in turn supply a soup kitchen for the orphans and vulnerable children. We are also planning our next clean up day on Feb 26th, building the capacity of the community leaders to know how to run this regular event themselves after we leave.
Thanks for reading,
Neil

New intern joins Project HOPE UK

Candice Wallace, currently studying for an MA in Children, Youth and International Development at Brunel University, has joined Project HOPE UK to help develop the Child Rights and Protection hub of The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville.
She will produce guidelines to promote child rights, address negative attitudes that lead to abusive behaviour and create a greater awareness among service providers of their statutory and moral obligations to children.
Candice was co-founder of the first Hip Hop Dance School in Trinidad and Tobago, a non-profit youth troupe dedicated to cutting-edge entertainment, dance education and outreach to diverse communities. She was also the creator and manager of BLACKOUT - a project targeting teenagers through the power of dance, and founder and president of Revolutionary Initiatives for Social Enrichment (R.I.S.E), a non-governmental organisation dedicated to community and youth development and child rights advocacy.
Candice's experience with these programmes will help Project HOPE UK implement proactive strategies to greatly enhance the protection of children in Munsieville.
Check back soon for more on Candice's work with the Child Rights and Protection hub.

Green light for young journalists

This week has been really exciting. Above and beyond filming some fabulous welly-whacking dancing for our schools exchange programme, the biggest development this week was that the Journalism Academy got its green light for funding from the Silverstar Casino. This means now that the group can go ahead with the necessary equipment: 6 digital cameras, 6 laptops and coursework materials. It’s a great testament to the effort put in by the young people themselves, as it’s their films, newsletters and successful internships that have really shown that this project has merit. With the financial backing, it also means that some of the young people can eventually get a paid stipend for leading the group, after some months of demonstrating their commitment.
The 10-month long course is going to be a joint project between Munsieville and another nearby township Swanieville, catering for about 40 young people in total, giving them a much needed leg-up into finding work.
Even though there is going to be a hectic few weeks ahead of writing the curriculum, training the project leads, and getting media partners onboard, I feel really proud about the accomplishment already. It felt sometimes feels a bit like playing space invaders… as you blast away one obstacle to the project, another one descends in its place. But it’s a great feeling as you get nearer and nearer to the goal. You have to think through all the aspects of the project: rather than increasing the project lead’s cash stipend, I came up with an idea of making a part-time journalism course part of the package. This way we lock in commitment and develop knowledge and skills, which ultimately comes back to benefit the wider group.
The nicest aspect was the reaction from the young people themselves. We met 19 year old Zeblon, a Zulu guy from Swanieville who was part of the pilot journalism project in Munsieville last year , and whom we are giving the chance to develop into one of the project leads. He has no job and can’t get into school. When I told him about the opportunity, he was so excited. I’ve never seen someone try so hard to both contain and express their delight at the same time.
Check out the the Youth Voice Journalism section on our Web site for the first stories from this exciting new project.
Thanks for reading,
Neil

Linking schoolchildren across the world

Our Connecting Continents schools exchange programme is building momentum. This week the high schools came onboard. Betty and I met Mr Mabusa, one of the teachers from the Munsieville high school, Thuto Lefa, who was really excited about the project. My brother-in-law Ronnie has also been doing an excellent job of bringing onboard a partner school Douglas Academy, in Glasgow, Scotland, where he is one of the teachers. Both schools seem fascinated by the prospect of having contact with an as-yet-unknown school and its pupils on the other side of the planet. We are developing a new part of the Project HOPE website for the exchange so that the schools can share their stories with each other and with you too.
Meanwhile, in the same project, I was lucky enough to share the first pen pal letters with 5th grade pupils from Phatudi, one of the Munsieville primary schools. To do this, I attended the weekly assembly at 7.30am on Friday morning. The early start was worth it as it was incredibly uplifting seeing over a thousand pupils belting out songs (complete with dance moves) that they knew by heart. It was certainly more inspiring that the school assemblies I remember from my own childhood, filled with dreary lectures from the head-teacher and miming hymns read from tatty song-books. The letters were written by pupils at Ishikawa, Michelle’s daughter’s school in Arizona. To the best of my knowledge I explained a little about Arizona (hmm, desert, cacti, etc) and then the kids performed a few songs and dances for me to video to share back to their peers in the US. The kids who had written letters on the Phatudi side were absolutely bursting with pride and delight when they received their replies, holding tightly in their small hands, these precious, beautifully-decorated messages of hope and friendship from abroad.
One of the other highlights from this week was the film event we put on in Mayibuye, to showcase some of the films produced by the Youth Voice Journalism crew. Any event in Munsieville is a real test of your resourcefulness, with no budget and next-to-no equipment. I had to beg, borrow and almost steal everything involved. The lop-sided tent was erected on the dirt football pitch, with the guys hammering in the poles with rocks (Mother nature helping out as one guy said). The screen was a bedsheet and power came from the same deathtrap electrical cable from the festival. I had to flag down some pick up trucks to help us move the equipment. Unfortunately, there’s an attitude of nothing comes from free so some serious bartering ensued, to make people understand that these activities are not for me but for their community. The event, despite the usual collection of mishaps, was eventually a great success and hopefully not only inspired pride in the community but generated another fresh set of recruits for the Thoughtful Path.
Check back next week for more on the preparations for our fundraising event at the Silverstar casino in March.
Thanks for reading,
Neil

It's official - Munsieville's got talent!

This week’s focus on showcasing Munsieville’s talent continued with the auditions for our 'Munsieville’s Got Talent' contest. All week we had been spreading the word about the competition, through posters, schools, loud-hailing, and word-of-mouth. Excitement built feverishly about the prospect of winning the prize of performing live at the Silverstar casino at our charity fund-raiser on 3rd March. As usual though, we had no idea of what to expect would happen on the day itself – just what talent was out there waiting to perform?
The day began in bright sunshine around 7am at the Munsieville community hall, our venue for the day. The contest was due to start around 8am but African time prevailed and we didn’t get going til 10am. It transpired that the reason for the late start was one of our judges, a Miss Soweto finalist, was putting extra effort into her hair.
The judges introduced themselves before we began the proceedings. We had Xalani, a hip hop dancer; Samantha, the beauty queen; and Teddy, a stage and TV actor. We’d briefed them to look out for stage persona, originality, appearance, and interaction with fans, and they had big crosses and STOP signs to hold up if an act was terrible and had to stop (used fairly frequently). They did a great job of assessing the performances and giving constructive feedback. Teddy adeptly played the part of Simon Cowell, casually crushing the dreams of a whole series of Munsieville hopefuls.
The performances started slowly, with mostly stage-fright-struck primary school-children screeching hymns or Westlife songs into the microphone. Then, bit by bit, Munsieville’s talent began to reveal itself through some weird and wonderful acts. There was Johannes, who could do bird and animal noises. Neo and his group from Mayibuye (who performed at the Tshepo festival) put together a heart-stopping and foot-pounding display of traditional dancing. Simon, in a wheelchair, performed a blistering set of stunts (with only one tumble). A gospel choir raised the rafters with their harmonies. There were poets, acrobats, models, actors and divas. Perhaps most impressive of all were several groups of young male dancers, who set the stage (and the audience) on fire with their awesome manoeuvres.
Sixty-four acts in total rolled out on the stage over the next five hours. As the day wore on, the crowd swelled, with people poking their heads through windows at the top and back of the building. There were some notable differences from a talent contest back home. There were no pushy mothers shoving their little darling forward. In fact, there weren’t really any parents at all. Imagine if your 4-year old had plucked up the courage to perform in front of 500 people – there would be mum, dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles all out to give support. Not so in Munsieville - most of the children just performed for themselves or in front of their friends. It struck me as sad that the adults can’t or don’t want to take time to celebrate their own children’s achievements. I hope in some way the Thoughtful Path project can address this so that children are better cared for and cherished within the community.
Thanks for reading,
Neil Davidson, GSK PULSE volunteer with Project HOPE UK