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Anton Cuyler CEO Welcome to our first Sozo Foundation newsletter! We are so excited to share with you our news and exploits, our project updates and our township tales. We have been on an incredible journey since it all started in February 2011, and want to invite you to come along for the ride.
For the average middle class South African, a first trip into the heart of Vrygrond is an assault on the senses. A rubbish dump welcomes you as you enter, litter is strewn all over the dusty roads, small tin shacks fit haphazardly next to each other, kids play together all over the streets, and stray dogs narrowly miss taxi’s as they hoot on their way down the roads. This is where the Sozo Foundation has set up its offices; in two containers next to a public library, surrounded by shrieking kids and noisy pollution. Happily located there to serve the people of the community; people living in the thin, dilapidated shacks around them. And in this setting of poverty and neglect, drugs, alcoholism, abuse and gangsterism, is a story of dignity restored and hope found.
This issue’s staff profile… Francisca Jeftha (Cisca) (Eden Garden Centre Manager) Being in her seventh month of managing the Garden Centre, Cisca is one of the newest members of The Sozo Foundition. She is a powerful and capable woman, with strong leadership attributes. She works the ground at the Garden Centre, planting seeds, making compost and lovingly making sure everything she plants grows up to be beautiful and strong. Cisca’s life story, although far from usual, is also one of beauty and strength! Having lost both her parents at a very young age, Cisca grew up on a smallholding with her grandmother just outside the Vrygrond area. Her grandmother showed her everything she knew, not only about gardening, but also about the business of selling their produce at several local stalls. But Cisca started going the wrong way in high school and decided to leave when she was in Grade 8.
She was spending time with the wrong people and started living a life of drug abuse. She got involved with a gangster who fathered two children with her. This man ended up leading the gang he was a part of, and Cisca found she was automatically a part of its leadership. Her grandmother was heartbroken at her lifestyle, and Cisca knew there were other plans for her life besides the life of drugs and gangsterism that she was leading. Finally they managed to break away from the gang, and from the area they were living, and moved into the Vrygrond area, away from their old friends and lifestyles. But even through her dark and dangerous background, entrenched in the power-plays of gangsterism and crime, Cisca always took time to nurture beautiful plants and flowers. This was a part of her upbringing, a gentle reminder of who she was, growing up under the loving guardianship of her grandmother. Today, that young girl has stood up to become a pillar in the community, with a clear passion for gardens and plants. Her passion is clearly revealed, as when you enter the Eden Garden Centre, you enter into a paradise right in the heart of Vrygrond, that’s been lovingly created by her own hands. This is why The Sozo Foundation has entrusted Cisca to be the Eden Garden Centre manager. She now has plans to get her son through matric and send him to college. Cisca also plans to get her drivers’ license, and to finally finish building her house.
Roy Kempster (Chairman) This issue’s boardmember profile… Roy is a natural leader and encourager. Spending time with him is time unforgettably spent. His wisdom of life and understanding of human frailty brings an immediate healing to the heart of his audience. He naturally comes alongside people, investing hours in building relationships with them, and his particular pleasure is in raising them up as strong future leaders themselves. As a trained Accountant, he owned a very successful property business in Gauteng with about 70 staff members. While running this company he went through a very painful time in his personal life, and kept feeling that there must be more to life than what he was currently doing. When he moved to Cape Town, he started another company, this time in IT. He leads this company with two other visionary leaders, where appropriately, he heads up Client Relations. Roy feels there is a definite calling for him to be involved in Sozo. He feels his journey of brokenness and pain, and then of the healing he received, all made him realise the need we have to serve one another. As Chairman of the board, he offers everything he has to Sozo, and being a registered Auditor, he values the necessity of good governance, due diligence and total transparency. Although he completes the practical role of the position; ensuring meetings are held and that the legal aspects of the requirements are all covered, he feels the most important part for him is to come alongside the ones leading the work.
Anthea Kieghlaar Catering Manager Anthea is the “mother” who oversees the Educentre and the Sozo office spaces. She makes sure everyone’s got food to eat; that the staff has lunch and that the youth in the Educentre are well fed on a daily basis. She makes sure that the office and work areas are environments people want to work in, and that the youth in the Educentre are coming into a space every day that is welcoming, clean and fresh.
Nomthandazo Magadla Admin Assistant Nomthandazo, otherwise known as Thandi, is the most recent addition to the Sozo HQ team. She is the “glue” that keeps the office in order, on time and running smoothly. Her outspoken, vibrant attitude brings a smile to everyone’s face. She also has an aptitude for networking and is passionate about helping others.
Sozo’s Building Miracle Sozonites showing their commitment through attendance 2012
Attendance
2013
Term 1
60%
66%
Term 2
58%
81%
Term 3
60%
81%
Term 4
65%
90%
Average
61%
80%
Creative Inspiring Initiatives courses and excursions CII Courses No. of No. of Learners Learners exposed exposed Design Indaba 10 Justice Creates 45 Website Design 11 Six Thinking Hats 10 UCT Open Day 18 Edu/Eden Course 30 False Bay Open Day 12 45 Fit Footy Fun Day 12 WESSA Wonderful Women Fun Day 28 Graphic Design Course 12 Camp 45 Toastmasters 10 Six Thinking Hats 15 7 CII Excursion opportunities 7 CII Courses opportunities
CII Excursion
Term 1 Term 2
Term 3 Term 4 TOTAL
What positivity can achieve Jean’s Story: We are so proud of Jean Gilton who recently made Sozo Educentre history as testiment that it is never too late to pursue your dreams! Even after failing Grade 9 at the end of last year he gained perspective and started displaying a mind and behaviour shift from the beginning of the year! Thus after a Educentre excursion to the False Bay College Open Day he set his mind to wanting to complete his Matric via their National Certificate (Vocational) which allows you to also be equipped with a career focused avenue in Hospitality. We then support-ed and assisted him in the application process and we are so excited to announce that next year Jean will be attending False Bay College on a FULL scholarship!
In August 2013 Steve Morris, youth pastor and good friend of Sozo, preached at New-wine church conference in the UK. He shared his heart of compassion for the poor and the vision to build the first ever Youth Education Centre in Vrygrond. As he was sharing, a lady walked up and placed a 20 pound note at his feet....the atmosphere radically changed and people began streaming forward emptying their wallets on the stage. They counted 31k pounds...and this was not the end. During the day people continued to give and at the youth meeting that evening another whopping 15k pounds was added, making a total donation of 55k pounds towards the new Sozo Building! We are now awaiting permission to go ahead with the building plans and an official opening launch date has been set for June 2014…what a miracle…
The plot of land we are building on
Building to be completed June 2014
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3 Boutiques in the last few months.
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A team from the United Kingdom came to volunteer at Sozo, and refurbished one home and garden.
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First fully sponsored corporate team-building Boutique
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On the 21 August 2013, we launched our first Lifeskills, Fire and Safety workshop.
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On the 24 August 2013,we launched our Relationship Building program, partnering with Clinical Psychologist, Colleen Anderson.
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The month of October saw the first Health and Safety workshop and a Crime prevention workshop will follow soon • • • • •
Of the 8 houses Boutique has refurbished, 7 are families headed by single mothers. The average, 3-roomed house consists of a bedroom, living room and toilet, with 6 people on average living in it. The maximum we have discovered living in one home is 9 people. The whole of Vrygrond is made up of beach sand and rubble. Vrygrond youth drop-out rates tend to start in High School, where they can’t maintain the required educational level, and start to search for their identity and belonging in gangsterism. Vrygrond/Capricorn and the immediate informal surrounding areas is home to 42,000 people of whom around 60% have been victims of crime such as armed robbery, rape, damage to property, violent physical and sexual assault and gang related shootings.
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The Vrygrond Comunity Development Trust (VCDT) handed over a plot of land that was being cultivated as a community vegetable garden to Sozo to set up a Garden Centre.
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Francisca Jeftha has been employed as the manager of the Garden Centre since 1st April 2013
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Planted 8 trench beds of vegetables, with the help of a team of 16 volunteers from Community Church Chafford Hundered (CCCH) from the United Kingdom.
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Built a seedling nursery at the Garden Centre producing 1600 seedlings during 2013.
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Since March 2013 forty two people in the community completed the 10-week home gardener training course. 30 of these are women who now have their own home-vegetable-gardens. The others are youth from Sozo Educentre who planted and now maintain a vegetable garden at the Vrygrond Community Library / Sozo Office HQ.
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In partnership with Learn to Earn, Sozo Eden held an 8-week Business Skills training course for 5 people. The course aims to equip the attendees with micro-entrepreneurship skills. We plan to run another course for the Sozo Eden Home-Gardeners in the near future.
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The Sozo Eden Garden Centre was awarded the title “Best Food Garden Enterprise 2013” by local environmental NGO Soil for Life at their annual Prize Giving in November 2013
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Sozo Eden has been selling organic vegetables grown at the Garden Centre to members from organisations in the local community.
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Organic compost and seedlings from the Garden Centre are constantly supplied to Home-Gardeners who are given coupons for enough of these materials to start up their home-garden.
Educentre Attitude is everything The Educentre is set up in the local community library and runs every afternoon. Pre-approved learners attend every day to do their schoolwork or receive assistance with projects they’re doing for school. Here is a story of a girl who stumbled across the Educentre, where she had a sudden realisation that an attitude change is key to success. It was a normal weekday afternoon in the Educentre. As Anton wandered through, he saw the unfamiliar face of a girl sitting at one of the desks, with big notebooks in front of her. She was working quietly. He went over and asked her her name. And the conversation went like this: “I’m Christina.” “Hello Christina. When did you come here?” “Just now.” (This means “earlier on”). “Are you new to the Educentre?” “What’s the Educentre?” “That’s where you are now.” “Oh I didn’t know.” “How did you find us?” “I was walking past and this looked to me like a safe place to do my homework.” Christina was copying her friend’s notes from school. The previous evening she had come home to find her family’s home had been broken into, and they had stolen everything, including her school bag with all her school books. This was just before her exams so her whole years’ work was lost. Her teacher had given her her friend’s textbook and said she must go home and copy it.
There was literally no place at home to sit and copy the textbook, as they had stolen everything, so she walked around Vrygrond, looking for a safe place to sit and work. Even though she’d never heard of the Educentre before, she had found the safe place she was looking for. This story immediately struck a chord in Anton’s heart. He helped her to make copies of the book, and Christina was speedily recruited as the latest member of the Educentre. What struck him was her amazing attitude and commitment to her education, regardless of the violation and loss that had just happened to her family. Over the last two years she’s been a committed member of the Educentre. During this time her attitude taught Anton much about not allowing your circumstances to rob you of your dreams. Today Christina is one of the Grade Representatives. Here is a poem written by Charles Swindoll that inspired her: Attitude The longer I live the more I realize the impact of attitude in life. Attitude to me is more important than the past, than education, than circumstances, than failure, than success,than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearances, giftedness, or skills. It will make or break a company, a church or a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding attitude we will embrace that day. We cannot change our past, we cannot change the fact that people will behave in a certain manner, and we cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play the string we have and that is our attitude I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it and so it is with you! We are in charge of our attitude. - Charles Swindoll -
Boutique
They were brought appliances; a toaster, kettle, oven, and utensils. They had the inside and outside of their little house From trolley to treasure painted. They had kitchen cupboards put in and were given a double bunk bed for their kids. Now all four people in the house Anthony is a scrap collector. Every morning he gets up early, have a bed to sleep on, which they are particularly happy about. says goodbye to his wife, gets his metal trolley, and wanders Dignity was restored. They also had a low wall built around the around the streets, looking for bits of metal to take to sell at the back of the house, where Anthony’s scrap can be kept out of nearby scrap yard. Whatever he makes from these sales is used sight behind the wall. This has enabled him to be more for food and prepaid electricity for his family for the day. That’s organised and efficient with the scrap, and has also given the how they survive. Their house is a depressing sight. The outside family space in the backyard to move around in. Anthony has area is piled high with scrap. It’s so full of junk that hasn’t been also managed to maintain his scrap yard and become far more sorted out yet and just continues to pile up. Their kids can’t play organised. He’s on target to become the best scrap collector outside as there’s no room for all the junk covering the ground. there is, in Vrygrond. Anthony’s wife no longer wants to be at home. Even their toilet is broken and clogging, and throwing their waste into a man-made hole in the yard has become the norm. Shame and depression of how the house looks has overcome her. With their marriage deteriorating, she starts to drink to forget what her surroundings look like. Her drinking begins to affect their children, and her whole family situation starts spiraling. Sozo started a relational journey with this family through their daughter who is part of the Sozo youth program, finding out about their lives and what they need. A corporate company sponsored the refurbishment of their home and surrounding garden, and a Boutique day was set up. This family was given a new toilet that’s stable, and doesn’t shift around like their old one did. Concrete floors were covered with tiles throughout for hygiene reasons. We removed plastic toilets and replaced them with ceramic toilets. Replace old rusty window frames with new aluminum window frames that can withstand the weather. New electrics were installed throughout the house, including light switches and plug points for the very first time. The girl was sleeping on a single bed without any mattress but only metal chains. The place where the metal structure stood, posing as their daughter’s bed, now has a beautiful bunk bed with bright coloured duvet and pillow cases. A small, yet cozy space, for a family to sleep in peace at night.
Eden Persistence pays off Another stay-at-home mother of 7 children has just completed the 10 week home gardening course and has one of the best vegetable gardens in Eden history! Her commitment and creativity, along with her passion for growing organic vegetables has enabled Eden to send her to an Assistant Trainers training course at Soil for Life. If she completes the training she will be employed by Soil for Life as an Assistant Trainer and will teach others in the Vrygrond community how to grow their own organic vegetables. The Golden Girls, a group of five women who have just recently completed their 10-week Home-Garden Training, have shown the most incredible commitment, cohesion and community spirit of any group we have trained before. These women, who knew each other before the course, have attended almost every session, encouraged and helped each other by visiting at each home and working in their gardens together. They have even gone as a group to the Garden Centre to collect materials they need for their gardens. They are constantly on the look out for waste and “rubbish” that they can use in their gardens, cleaning up their community at the same time. These women are changing the community of Vrygrond, one garden at a time!
• From a survey done in the Vrygrond area, it was found that 42% said they live in houses with broken windows, 81% have walls in the house that need repainting, and 87% have plastic toilets. • Gang membership offers protection, powerful male role models,a means of financial and material gain as well as a sense of belonging and identity. • Half of all violent crime in the greater Cape Town area is gang-related and gang memberships estimated at 100,000 members mostly. between the ages of 10 and 25 years. • In every house Boutique has restored this year, 1 of the family members is in prison. • Most people’s diet in the community consists of bread, pap (maize meal) and cheap chicken or fish. If they eat vegetables, it’s mostly potatoes, tomatoes, or cabbage. • You’ll hardly find any green waste. Everything is eaten and devoured; vegetable offcuts,chicken bones, vegetable peels. • The only waste commonly found is plastic.
• For R250k towards New Sozo Centre building project • For building material donations to help build the new Educentre facility that will host 145 learners. Cement, Bricks, aluminum windows, paint • For 3 new laptops for our new staff joining us in January 2014. • For an upright fridge for our Sozo Youth program so we can start cooking meals at Sozo youth every Friday. • For a small bar-fridge for our Eden Garden Centre staff office. • For garden edging to support the garden beds at the Eden Garden Centre, approx.: 100m of edging required. • For more weekly tutors of maths, science, Afrikaans and English. • For more teams and Corporates to sponsor a Boutique, and to use the refurbishing of community homes as a teambuilding project for their company. R30k per project. • Donations of new electrical appliances, household items or any other type of gift we could award to our home gardeners at our Annual Gardening Competition
• The launch of two new Sozo project Sozo Lifeskills and Sozo School of life • New Sozo Building launch in June 2014, includes space for 145 high school learners, new offices, new Lifeskills training Centre • Toastmasters are enthused to run another course with us later next year. • Partnership and collaboration with Ikamva Youth, along with other similar organisations – training to take place Jan 2014. • Eden will run two home-gardening training courses next year with at least 10 people per group and we will host our own Home-Gardening Competition. We also aim to make the Garden Centre self-sustainable.
Donate Money Should you wish to donate online please visit www.thesozofoundation.org.za
Banking Details ● ● ● ●
The Sozo Foundation Trust Standard Bank Account No: 072043776 Branch Code: 025-509
Donate Time ● ●
Educentre: arlene@thesozofoundation.org.za Eden: kate@thesozofoundation.org.za
Corporate teambuilding sponsorship Boutique Style ● ●
natasha@thesozofoundation.org.za +27 (0)83 544 4406
Contact Us
(021) 825 5529/7 (Mobile) +27 (0)71 403 5516 admin@thesozofoundation.org.za anton@thesozofoundation.org.za
Come and visit us!
Cnr of Vrygrond Ave & Trevor Siljeur Rd, Vrygrond, Muizenberg Cape Town 7945