Arm In Arm In Africa - Who We Help

Donate Today

Ubuntu

The concept of ubuntu has its roots in a traditional African maxim, which is expressed in isiXhosa as umntu ngumntu ngabantu (people are people through other people). One of the popular definitions describes it as the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.

An attempt at a longer definition has been made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999):

“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are

“Humanity was born in Africa. All people, ultimately, are African.”

humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” Louw (1998) suggests that the concept of ubuntu defines the individual in terms of their several relationships with others, and stresses the importance of ubuntu as a religious concept. He states that while the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ("a person is a person through (other) persons") may have no apparent religious connotations in the context of Western society, in an African context it suggests that the person one is to become by behaving with humanity is an ancestor worthy of respect or veneration. Those who uphold the principle of ubuntu throughout their lives will, in death, achieve a unity with those still living.

Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows;

“A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

Malungeni Quarterly Food Distributions

The extent of malnutrition in South Africa is far worse than most people realize. Your contributions makes a difference to the people who have been so marginalized through a history of Apartheid.

Three times a year 80 families in Malungeni receive food through the Arm In Arm in Africa emergency food distribution program. The emergency food aid is in the form of large portions of rice, sugar, mealie meal, samp, flour, cooking oil and beans; helping families concentrate on essentials such as shelter, clothing and school supplies for children.

Gugulethu

More about SOUTH AFRICA (United Nations and United States Government Statistics)

Population - 44,187,637 (July 2006 estimate) down from 43,647,658 (July 2002 estimate) "note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and death rates, lower population and growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected"

Life Expectancy

42.73 years (2006 estimate for total population) down from 45.43 years (2002 estimate) female: 43.25 years - male: 42.19 years

AIDS Infection Rate - 21.5% (2003 estimate, up 2% from 2000 estimate)

HIV/AIDS Infection - 5.3 million (2003 estimate)

HIV/AIDS Deaths - 370,000 (2003 estimate)

Population below the poverty line - 50% (2000 estimate)

Unemployment - 26% (2006 estimate)

The statistics tell one story, but Arm in Arm in Africa exists because these statistics are more than just numbers... they're people... and people can make all the difference in changing these statistics.

J.L. Zwane Centre www.jlzwane.sun.ac.za

Named after its founding pastor and located in the heart of Guguletu Township outside Cape Town, JL Zwane Centre was established in 1994 as a joint initiative of the Stellenbosch University, the Guguletu community and the JL Zwane Church to provide space for people to meet people and share skills necessary for development.

JL Zwane Centre has become "a place" where highly skilled individuals, from different racial groups, feel safe and pass on skills to those who could not acquire them during the difficult days of Apartheid. A number of developments have since been welcomed by government, non-governmental faith based business, national and international communities.

Financing the activities at the Centre is dependent on sponsors and public donations due to historic, financial deprivation of the residents of the community. With the rate of unemployment as high as 65% the centre relies upon donations and voluntary support. Training, development and management skills are required to advance individuals and the community to help them succeed. The Centre has become a venue for a number of programs including Inzame Zabantu community health center, The Rainbow after-school study program, HIV/AIDS Education and Training, JL Zwane Siyaya and nutrition program.

Reverend Spiwo Xapile

Because many families cannot afford to send their children to the J.L. Zwane Center, your gift will help a new generation of children secure a better education and a brighter future.

May I thank Arm in Arm in Africa for the support of many years for the Malungeni community. Malungeni, like millions of black South Africans is struggling to survive amid grinding poverty that makes it difficult for those affect to perform normal daily duties. If you are not working for the police, or a teacher or a nurse or a migrant worker you have no income.

Women over the age of 60 and men over the age of 60 and those with disabilities receive Government grants of about $100 a month and have to support families and extended families. Schools are affected by poverty as many children find it hard to attend and or/concentrate in the classrooms. This is an experience of more than half the population of South Africa. Hunger is a way of life as routine as the diseases it inflicts.

The extent of malnutrition in South Africa is far worse than most people realize. The contribution made by Arm in Arm in Africa makes a lot of difference to people so marginalised. About 80 families receive food each

time Arm in Arm in Africa distributes food and this is done three time each year in February, May and October. This emergency food aid in the form large portions of Rice, Sugar, Mealie Meal, Samp, Floor, Cooking Oil, Beans helps families concentrate on other essentials like clothing and school supplies for children rather than worry about what to eat. For most families it can last for a month and this depends usually on the size of the family. People in Malungeni really appreciate this support and are very greatful to have it.

The Rainbow School

One of the users will be the Rainbow School, which has been meeting for over two years in shipping containers. Four afternoons seven teachers and a librarian help seven separate classes of up to 14 children with their homework, and educationally otherwise supported. The School started when it was recognized that a lot of children have nowhere to do their homework and sometimes no one to help them with it. Teachers were voluntary, classes large and mixed and the whole process unpredictable. It was transformed by the offer from a community group in Richmond, London to fund the payment of the teachers.

The Rainbow School is now a serious educational facility. Its head-teacher, Ms Thadiwa Sopazi is a retired teacher of standing. Her work includes the ability to help her staff upgrade their skills in the new South African curriculum and methodology. She and her staff put much emphasis on individual confidence building through individual attention. The pupils of the Rainbow School are often praised at their daytime schools for the progress they have made.

The school is a boon to working parents who know their childrens' homework is being coped with, and that they are safe in the afternoon and to unemployed parents who have few facilities at home and may themselves be close to non-literates.

HIV/AIDS Support

It was not long into the life of the Rainbow School when it was realized many of the children arrive hungry: indeed, some have had no food all day. The Richmond Group (England) now provides money for a meal every homework day. It may well account for the high regular voluntary attendance at the school.

Those meals are cooked by a group of Churchwomen who call themselves Mapathisane, which means 'working together'. They have had training in catering and are willing and able to cook also for Church and other functions. Mapathisane cooks each midday also for local school children

who are without family support. Some are orphans, some neglected, and some live with HIV. Many eat only on the days when they get a meal at the Centre. The Centre's nutrition outreach also has a focus in the Church's HIV/AIDS programme. Two years ago, a young man said that he wanted to disclose his HIV status in the public forum of a Church service. That flew directly in the face of the stigma associated with HIV, so it was a brave action by the young man and by the Church for encouraging it.

There were several remarkable consequences. First, others living with HIV or AIDS, or with affected family members, asked to do the same. Every Sunday now one or more people tell their stories. People began coming from other Churches where the subject was still taboo. Even more surprising, it immediately became apparent that the act of disclosure itself has a dramatic positive effect on the health status of the person concerned. This may be linked to the third development a formation of a series of support groups for people affected by HIV or AIDS. Once a week the whole lot meet together under the leadership of Zethu Xapile, wife of Spiwo. And each week more come to declare their status and take courage from the support.

The Centre, through the HIV/AIDS support group, regularly arranges for the training of batches of volunteers to support people affected by the virus in their own homes. Part of that care is of course decent nutrition. The Church is in contact with an American expert in nutrition for people with AIDS; and the gallant women of the Mapathisane group will have another task the preparation of food for people living with AIDS in their own homes.

It becomes obvious that running through the work of the Church and the Centre is, of course, the multiple effects of poverty, including hunger, even starvation. A service attended by the writer one morning was interrupted when a carefully dressed elderly woman fainted from lack of food. Hunger stunts the mental and physical growth of children for the rest of their lives. It also makes them and their parents vulnerable to killer diseases, including TB and AIDS.

Coping with all this is expensive because it is labour intensive machines cannot care for people dying at home and because it is about lack of basic necessities like food. Volunteers do most of the work, but it should be paid because it is vital and painful and skilled. Hence the need for continuous funding from outside the area. The slogan that services should be paid for 'at the point of delivery' is a cruel joke to a woman dying in a shack in the company of eight children, five of them inherited from dead relatives. That is the story of a real woman, not an apocryphal story.

When the Centre gets into full swing other projects will come on stream. One proposal would develop a LETS (local exchange trading system)

currency that will enable people in the area to trade with each other without needing rands. It will activate skills now dying for lack of a market and raise the standard of living all round. There will also be a variety of skills training though the truth is there are already unemployed skilled people: skills are not the problem in South Africa; jobs are the problem - as they are in most countries.

At root, South Africa is suffering from a crisis in employment. Partly this is due to the apartheid legacy, which left 70% of the population ill educated by design under the Bantu Education Act - and suffering generations of malnutrition and demoralization. Plus a public service that knew nothing about service, and for whom the public was largely White and tolerated a high degree of corruption.

But partly it is due to the acceptance by the new government of the economic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, whose global market concentrates wealth and creates poverty. It has done so in the rest of Africa, in Argentina and the rest of South America, in Russia. You name it. Hence the 'ocean' into which the J.L. Zwane Centre feeds its beautiful drops of compassion. “A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu Patron of the Desmond Tutu TB Centre of Stellenbosch University.

Brown’s Farm Clinic

Churches in South Africa have a long history of involvement in education, and health care, hence the JL Zwane’s involvement in the informational settlement with a population of about 130, 000 people. The clinic serves an average of 120 patients a day. Patients using the clinic suffer from tuberculous, chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertation, epilepsy and pollution related asthma, gastro enteritis, HIV/AIDS, eczema, malnutrition related marusmus, kwasioka and other conditions.

The following lists identifies the limited staffing levels One full-time doctor, one sessional doctor working for one hour each day for four days a week, five professional or registered nurses each with four years

training, three of whom are clinical practitioners taking turns working at the pharmacy, one enrolled nurse with two years training, two nursing assistance, two clerks, two General assistants and one HIV/AIDS lay counselor.

Child Run Households

Nearly seventy percent of homes in the townships in South Africa are “child run”, meaning because of deaths from chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS, phenomena of parents, grandparents, children are left to run the household and raise their siblings with little or no help, as well as raise themselves and take care of their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. Many are shunned by the very siblings they are raising because they too have contracted the disease that has taken their parents.

One Child was placed in a room with a sign above it that read “ The wages of sin are death.” Her father placed the sign there before her death to shame her for contracting the disease. Her sister took all the

money that the state provided her to raise the family because she was not worthy of it. Leaving them to suffer with this horrible condition on their own.

Intipini

The Sisters of Charity

A green oasis in an otherwise barren area. Six sisters care for people in end stages of various diseases. We saw about 8 beautiful children and others. Everything was clean and you could just sense the love they had for each person. Mother Teresa actually picked the spot for this special place and she herself has been there. Archbishop Flynn said Mass there when he visited with Jim and the Arm in Arm delegation.

Philani http://www.philani.org.za/

Philani is committed to the promotion of good child health and nutrition, the prevention of child malnutrition and the rehabilitation of underweight children to normal nutrition status and good health, in a caring, supportive, environment. It is also committed to limiting the suffering of families infected and affected by HIV and preventing the spread of the virus through a comprehensive program of education, care, support and treatment.

Philani's vision is a South Africa where every child can grow up healthy

and well nourished to fulfill his or her physical and mental potential.

The organization is also committed to the education and training of women in skills to generate income, in order to make previously destitute families economically independent and in that way prevent child malnutrition and contribute to the development of their communities. Philani's development programs specifically target young women for education and skills training, to give them independence and power to make decisions about their own lives. Women without education and economic independence become especially vulnerable to sexual and other abuse and with that also to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Philani is committed to using its access to and credibility within its target communities to fight HIV/AIDS through the empowerment of women, education of men, and care of children affected by or infected with the virus.

Home Our Partners How To Help Contact Us