Obstacles

The past few weeks we’ve been going out on site visits to the drop-in centres. You learn interesting things on site visits, when you get to spend individual time with each centre. None of it is necessarily unique in South Africa. The obstacles that confront each drop-in centre is replicated somewhere else in the country, time and time again.

We visited one of our drop-in centres for the second time. The first time, about five months ago, they had started on a few of the assignments but had yet to implement most of the management material. Upon returning a couple weeks ago, they still had done nothing. The manager wasn’t there, so we spoke to one of the carers. The carer had never seen the empty record books we were upset about. She talked to us for a while, and it turned out that the manager was illiterate and didn’t want to tell us, nor did she want to deputize somebody else to keep the necessary records.

Up north near Malamulele, we visited a small network of centres we hadn’t worked with before. They seemed hard-working and eager, with a lot to work on. They showed us an enormous juice-making machine they had gotten from the Department of Social Development to start an income-generating project. A person from the DSD came out to show them how to use it, but the electricity at the centre was off indefinitely so they had to postpone the training. The electricity eventually came back on, but then the DSD worker was off in Thohoyandou and said he would come back after he was finished there. On his way, he got into a car crash and died. The DSD didn’t have anyone else available to train them and eventually discontinued the program. The juice-maker, along with sundry equipment like juice containers, has been collecting dust in a corner of the centre for three years now.

Based on visits this month to maybe a third of the centres we work with, I would say maybe ten or fifteen percent are implementing a significant amount of what we’re teaching them. On the brighter side, if that’s only five (maybe as many as eight or ten) centres, each one works with about 100 OVCs, so that’s five hundred children impacted.