Siyakhula OVC Christmas Party

Today was Siyakhula's last day of operation before Christmas. It was also the day of their OVC Christmas Party. It was such a wonderful event, filled with speakers and dancing and the giving away of duvet sets to 20 of their children.Representatives from Social Development and Small Projects Foundation spoke, along with the OVC Coordinators for both Philisa and Mdumbi HBCs and myself.
It was very good for Philisa and Mdumbi to be there. Events like these will soon be part of their programs and it is a very good learning experience for them to be able to see how these events are put on and participate in them.
Siyakhula has estimated that there are about 557 Orphans and Vulnerable Children, in their area who have been receiving services from Siyakhula since 2008. These services include blankets, winter clothes, uniforms, and food parcels, among other thing. They also have 50 foster parents participating in the support group they set up specifically for foster parents in their ward.
Siyakhula and especially Lindelwa received much deserved praises for the hard work they have been doing in their community. Here Lindelwa is dancing with a choir from one of the local schools.







Ntomfikile the OVC Coordinator for Mdumbi and Nontandazo, the Project Leader of Philisa speaking about their work and the importance of supporting OVCs.






This event was the last for Home Based Care for this year as all of the offices are now closed for Christmas. In January Lindelwa will begin working full time with Transcape as the HBC Coordinator and we will begin intensively training all of the HBCs together.

Happy Holidays!

World AIDS Day

Thursday was World AIDS Day in Libode, an event put on by a few different organizations in this area along with some government representatives. Siyahkula HBC was one of the organizations who helped to plan the day and so I went with them to the event.
The event was very successful. There was a ceremony with speakers from the different representatives as well as a lot of traditional dancing. There were also opportunities for VCT in seperate tents outside. Siyakhula helped to arrange the catering for the day and the people who attended were able to have a cooked meal. Even though the day was very rainy and miserable, there was a huge number of people in attendance and all of them seemed to have a very good time!
The day was concluded with a candle light service for those were living with or had passed away from AIDS. People living with HIV were asked to come to the front and together they sang and prayed. While I couldn't understand exactly what was being said, the impact of the words could definately be felt and it was an amazing thing to be part of.

Planning

Lately my work with the homebased care groups has been alot more office based than work with the groups themselves. I have been working closely with Lindelwa, the project leader of Siyakhula and soon to be Home Based Care Coordinator for TransCape. Together we have been making a plan for how we would like to add quality to the care provided by the groups throughout the next 2 years and more specifically for me over the next 6 months.
One of our biggest goals for the groups for over the next coming months is that they will all be using a system of reporting with which we will be able to gather information about each client and the type of care they are receiving from the carers. We would like this information to be both outcome based, showing what services are being provided and who exactly is receiving those services, and also personal enough to be able to easily monitor that each individual patient is receiving the proper care from their carer.
We also plan to provide more trainings for the carers, most importantly getting all of the carers certified for home based caring. Some of this training has already begun, with 5 members of Siyakhula and one member each from Philisa and Mdumbi being trained along side the prevention teams in Voluntary Counselling and Testing.
The Home Based Care groups are all getting ready to wrap up their years and take a break for christmas which means that a lot of work must be done in the next 2 weeks in terms of planning for the start of next year.