Welcome Home

Fact: three more orphan homes have been completed up on the Dvudvusi row and the 18 children moved in last Saturday.

This home is located in the neighbourhood of Dvudvusi (pronounced “doo-doo-zie”). Dvudvusi is a tiered hillside neighbourhood distinguished by its long rows of homes (if you’ve been to town this is the area at the very top of the brightly coloured village/smartie box houses).

This area formally housed migrant workers for the mine and these particular homes are located on the second row from the top of the hill (row yet to be named) just below a row of recently rehabilitated houses, which have recently (within the past six months) become home to many of Bulembu’s children. These homes are also located on the same row as the new centralized dining hall facility.

The process of renovating an orphan home is as follows:

Once a home as been structurally assessed, workers begin demolition - the old fixtures are dismantled, walls are taken down and the old asbestos roof is appropriately removed. Next, the home’s floor plan is reconfigured to include three bedrooms, one bathroom and a living room (remember, there’s no kitchen because all kitchen facilities are centralized). New windows and doors are installed, walls are prepped for new plaster, a new corrugated metal roof is installed and plumbing and electricity is run throughout the house. The final steps include painting, installing hardware and moving in all of the furniture needed to house six children and a caregiver.

And then last but not least the children settle into their new home.

The Kids Who Live Upstairs

So, here's the situation:

Up on the mountain there are rows of orphan homes. Currently only the top row is filled. The Central Dining Room is on the row below these homes. To get to the Dining Room for each meal the children have been walking down the road or cutting through the bush.

This isn’t ideal for a number of reasons:

(1) Children running on the road is a universal no-no.

(2)  Children cutting through bush = mud on their feet = extra cleaning in the dining hall.

(3) Children cutting through bush = children tripping and falling = not good.

What is ideal, however, is that the G & J Paving team (Edmonton, Canada) has spent the last week in Bulembu and in partnership with local workers they have built a new staircase that connects the upper Dvudvusi row to the Central Dining Room.

“Building the staircase was very important for the Dvudvusi Orphan Care Program,” says Vernon Puttkammer, BMS’ Director of Orphan Care. “It’s important but not a priority enough to actually get done quickly. So when the G & J team came and offered to do the work for us we jumped at the chance. We really appreciate all of the hard work they put into building the staircase – it will make a big difference for the children.” 

Mighty Morphin' Royal Rangers

BMS kids on a day hike over Christmas holidays

Here and there people have been speaking about the Royal Ranger program. While this blogger embarrassingly spent the greater part of the past two months calling it the RURAL Ranger program (it’s an outdoor education program – it made sense to me!), the ROYAL Ranger program is a Christian based scouting and discipleship program that will be introduced to Bulembu Ministry Swaziland’s children within the next few weeks.

“It’s all about creating an environment where kids can learn how to experience deeper intimacy with Christ,” says Jason Mitchell, Bulembu’s Royal Ranger coordinator. “It’s not all about teaching scouting skills, even though that’s part of it. It’s about capturing their attention through the scouting and then taking them into deeper waters with Jesus.”

The Royal Ranger programs is an outdoor leadership program where children learn scouting and camping skills but also are provided with a safe environment within which they can tackle the tough issues that come with growing up.

“It’s not easy being a kid,” says Jason. “The Ranger program gives these kids a chance to be mentored. The kids meet once a week for group activities and leadership training and then once a quarter they participate in a camping experience.”

So that’s the program.

And here’s the building:

 

Nice, right?

Well not yet but it will be soon.

The building is now beginning to be renovated to house the Royal Ranger program’s offices as well as the storage facilities for all the camping and scouting equipment.

This particular building sits along the main street in town between the Bakery and the Clinic but on the opposite side of the road. It was the first building ever in Bulembu and served as the original Havelock Mine Offices. Since BMS was established the building has been left in its dilapidated state as town planners waited for the perfect reason to restore it. And now, the Royal Ranger program provides the perfect reason to do so.

While preliminary renovations have begun this week there is no estimated completion date for this project. 

The interior of the new home of Royal Ranger's offices.

 Panorama of where the building (far left) sits in town. You can see the Clinic on the top right.

Rescue. Raise. Rebuild.

 On Monday, February 22 BMS General Manager Andrew Le Roux and BMS Director of Orphan Care Vernon Puttkammer headed north to Uganda to spend ten days with the organization Watoto.

The name Watoto has become synonymous with the famous Children’s Choir but is actually indicative of a much larger organization – an organization that is very similar to Bulembu.

Watoto was birthed out of a local church in 1994 and according to its vision document the organization “provides holistic, residential care for orphaned and vulnerable children with the core vision to rescue a Child, raise a Leader and rebuild a Nation.”

Watoto is a set of two Villages of Hope - Bbira and Suubi. Each village has children's homes run by house mothers, schools and medical clinics to provide care for children. In addition to the children’s homes Watoto has also developed a vocational training school, a baby care program and have branched into programs that transform lives and restoring hope to those in war-torn Gulu in Northern Uganda. Like Bulembu, Watoto’s social workers partner with Ugandan social services to identify and admit vulnerable children into the Watoto homes.

“We visited Watoto because they’re doing what we want to do,” says Vernon. “We have a vision to take care of 2,000 orphaned children and to raise up future leaders and they are already doing this. They are a great resource for us as we look forward.”

Andrew and Vernon stayed in Watoto’s Guest House and spent their time in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, touring Watoto’s children’s villages, meeting with Team Leaders (upper management) and becoming inspired by the strong program Watoto has built.

“The experience was great to see people doing the big scale things out there,” Vernon says. “They face many similar challenges that we have even though they’ve been doing the childrens programs for so many years now. While they don’t have all the answers they are staying on vision and the pieces are falling into place.”

The Watoto vision includes plans to open a Watoto Hospital and a Watoto Univeristy and above all has a vision to empower 10,000 churches across Africa to replicate the Watoto model in their own communities, thus providing care for over 2 million of Africa’s orphaned and vulnerable children.

“We appreciated their transparency,” says Vernon. “The people who work for Watoto would share everything with us about their organization. They just really want to build God's Kingdom and help children. We are doing that too so they gave us a lot of help.”

One thing that Watoto’s story proves is that when it comes to a vision as big as theirs and as ambitious as Bulembu’s, the work is never finished.

“Many times you put a goal or a vision in front of yourself. Once you get there you think you’ll be able to rest but the people at Watoto showed us that once you achieve your vision everything increases ten-fold,” Vernon explains. “They started with children and now they’ve moved into widows and babies as well. There’s a constant increase – there are always more you can do to help.”

Caterpillar Grant Helps Bulembu Soar

 

Bulembu Supporter/Superfan/Sponsor: I've read about the Centralized Dining Hall before, but where does all that food that gets served there actually come from?

Bulembu Correspondent: Well, I'm glad you asked! Right now it is prepared in a small kitchen in the Welcome Center. The need to feed children has far outgrown the facilities in the Welcome Center and meal preparation for Bulembu Ministries Swaziland’s children is becoming more and more of a logistical nightmare.

Enter: the Caterpillar Foundation.

Through one of Bulembu Ministries Swaziland’s Canadian partners, NOW Africa, BMS has recently received a generous grant from the Caterpillar Foundation to complete the renovation of the Centralized Kitchen Facility.

(The opportunity that Caterpillar has given BMS is the opportunity of a matching grant of $1 for $1 up to $30,000 USD. Read: we raise it, they match it).

The Centralized Kitchen Facility will provide Bulembu Ministries Swaziland with a cost effective alternative to installing a kitchen in each home that is renovated for orphan care usage. Growing kids eat a lot and with over 100 new orphans expected to be welcomed into the Bulembu Orphan Care Program next year, the need is becoming critical.  

The building that will house the new Centralized Kitchen Facility is located next to the museum site and on the edge of the industrial Stores area. 

This project will employ six to eight full-time staff members who would work to cook and deliver 200 lunches and 200 dinners on a daily basis for the children under BMS’ care.

This project also provides BMS with the facilities to teach children about nutrition and food preparation so that when they move out of the program and are on their own they are have the skills to cook healthy, nutritious meals for themselves. 

In addition, a Centralized Kitchen Facility will allow Bulembu Ministries Swaziland to provide access to nutritional meals to Bulembu residents who are not able to prepare their own meals – especially those who are HIV positive in the community.

The renovation is slated to begin at the beginning of June with the center being fully operational by November 2010. 

 Interior of the Centralized Kitchen Facility site.

Done Like Dinner

 

Perched on the side of a mountain on the far side of town, the Dvudvusi Central Dining Room has been completed and is open for business. Hosting nearly fifty children each day for breakfast, lunch and dinner the Central Dining Room was built to streamline the Orphan Care Program's feeding process and to create a more efficient use of resources. 

"When we were serving meals to the children the houses there was no room for us to cook or eat the meals," explains Gennie Falcon, Manager of the Dvudvusi Orphan Homes. "This dining room was a necessity because we did not have the capacity to serve food to any more children that would move into our homes - but now we do."

The communal eating and washing-up areas allow the children to interact with other kids from different houses. The building, with it's vaulted ceilings and spacious interior, is also used for rainy day activities and movie nights.

The dining hall has the capacity to serve 200 children and as the Orphan Care Program continues to expand so too will the amount of children the Dining Hall serves each day. "It's neat being in the Dining Room - it's inspiring to see the space that will eventually house the realized vision the Orphan Care Program has for Dvudvusi," says Gennie. "When you're here it is easy to picture 200 kids laughing, eating and growing together."

Smartie Boxes Didn't Always Look So Smart

Dvudvusi row gets a facelift

More children + more house moms = more BMS Orphan Homes.

It's a simple equation but as the BMS Orphan Care Program expands and numbers increase so too does the need for new Orphan Homes. Anyone who has been to Bulembu has seen the final product - a clean, bright home with a tiled washroom, full kitchen and orderly bunk beds. But how many have seen where these homes began? 

With the Swazi 1000 descending on Bulembu in less than three weeks, BMS is ramping up to put a team of young people to work rennovating eight houses on the Dvudvusi hill. Here is a look at one house, Dvudvusi 386, before it goes under the knife (note it's roofless state).