changing communities through sport for 500 kids

Once again as Harvesters in Sport Trust, we would like to express our sincere gratitude for your continued support. We are continuing on an upward trajectory!

We have not had many workshops and visits this period but our work has continued unabated. The Social Worker and our team of Volunteers continued to explore possibilities for making our approach better. The beauty of our work is as we work we get to notice a few new areas needing our attention. As discussed below.

As explained in our previous newsletter we now have a 3-roomed cabin structure for the 15 most vulnerable children. We have not made any new progress as we continue to cooperate with the department of social services. They want to have their own assessments done and they might give us children from other areas to place in the temporary home. However, our pursuit of mattresses, blankets, and utensils for the home continues. Additionally, we have not managed to raise any new money to help us create 2 meals a day minimum for the 15. Our efforts and appeals continue.

We continue to push on towards our goal of feeding 500 children. Large numbers turn up for food during the weekends (200 or so on average), and during the week we have remained attending to the 60 to 70 critically in need of food. They too need at least 2 meals a day. Our nutrition levels have not necessarily improved as we have not mastered any new monies for the purpose but our quest for a more balanced diet for the children continues. Yes, our variety has improved but we are still not there yet. We however continue to ensure proper sanitary measures are adhered to in the preparation of the meals. We are happy to announce that we have not had a food-related ailment since we started the program. Kudos to the kitchen staff! Thank you for your donations and contributions as you are making it all possible.

While our laundry program has continuously improved since the birth of the program, notably increased numbers of children being covered in the program. From 22 children to 30 weekly, we are still handling just a fraction of the children in need. We can only hope you our friends sow into this aspect and help us to do more.

The School Program has remained largely stable powered by your financial assistance. We are eternally grateful for the few we are able to send to school. We do have many more who could use school fees support but maintaining the ones we have has been a major achievement this 2022. We do not owe any school any money. All fees are current and between now and January the focus is to get adequate fees in place before term 1 in 2023 starts. A few of the children will be leaving primary to go to high school. A major transition for some. We are thankful to the Social Worker and his team for the counseling sessions that have helped settle a lot of our children.

On the home learning front, We are keen to introduce Digital Literacy. It's sad that in this day and age the bulk if not all of the children in our program have had no access to the internet. We want to buy 5 tablets and create a digital literacy program by the end of February. We cant dare get into this in January as we need to make sure our children are back in school first then early February onwards works on a program for digital Literacy can begin. We can have the children in several groups and take turns to go and learn.

 This program should complement our homework and study scheme. This unfortunately is not very popular among children. We need to find ways to incentivize the process to get buy-in.  

Post-Covid lockdowns we finally managed to host our first sports day. (we had begun sporting activities as reported in our last report) We had the following sporting disciplines. Football (Soccer), Volleyball, and Netball. These remain our 3 core sporting disciplines. Children turned out in large numbers and managed to do knock-out competitions. And just have loads of fun in general. The fun is what it's all about!! We are looking forward to hosting another sports day in February 2023. Hopefully, invite a few sporting legends to come and give inspirational talks and tell kids amazing stories from their own sporting careers.

Finally, thank you so much for believing in us and for supporting our work. 2022 is almost done and dusted and our eyes are on 2023. May we serve together in 2023 and perhaps do even more as we seek to keep changing lives, one life at a time! We are truly thankful and honored to have you journey with us! #TOGETHERWECAN. 

As Harvesters in Sport Trust, we would like to thank our friends for such consistency in supporting our programs. You have proven to be a great community by constantly helping our programs sprout and grow. Words cannot express how much we appreciate your support for our cause as there is a huge difference since you came on board.

Workshops and Visits:

We are grateful that we have managed to secure a social worker to help and assist our programs formally and professionally. He is assisting and training our volunteers on how to handle children as well as ensuring their social welfare is guaranteed. We are almost done with our Child Safeguarding Policy. We have had more volunteers joining our team this season. We appreciate their passion to assist in making the lives of children better.

Home:

With your support, we have managed to put up a secure but temporary structure to house our most vulnerable children who struggle daily with food, accommodation, and education. This home has three rooms to accommodate 15 children. Our volunteers have also agreed to take turns looking after the children at the home. We hope to be able to raise support to provide three meals a day for these 15 and naturally continue to do a meal a day for the rest while our capacity grows to perhaps 2 meals and eventually 3 for all the feeding program children. Our other goal is raise support to furnish the home with furniture and necessities needed in the house for day-to-day activities.

Feeding Program:

We are delighted that our feeding program is slowly growing towards our main target of feeding 500 kids daily. our numbers have increased from feeding 70 children daily to 90 children daily and we have maintained 250 to 350 children on weekends. Our meals now have more variety than before so as to promote a balanced diet and promote health in our children. Also, the industrial gas stove makes everything easy to cater for large numbers. However, our aim still remains to feed 500 kids daily. Thank you for your donations and contributions as you are making it all possible. #TOGETHERWECAN.

Laundry Thursdays: 

Our laundry program is continuously improved since its birth. We have increased the number of children falling under this program from 15 children to 22 children. These 22 children are fully served under this program whereby they bring all their laundry and our volunteers take care of it. The rest get to have a few toiletries accompanied by hygiene lessons on those Laundry Thursdays. We are still struggling with the number of volunteers to take care of the Laundry Thursdays as most of them are occupied with the Feeding Program and Home Lessons. Our aim now is to get more resources and cater for more children including teaching the older ones to do own laundry. With enough assistance and contributions from you we know this is achievable. Also, we are working on improving our toiletries supply for adequacy and proper hygiene in our children.

School Program:

For our School program, we are grateful that we have managed to maintain the number of children we are paying for. However, our aspiration is to increase the number of children under our scholarship program. Despite the hikes in school fees, your support has enabled us to match the rising costs. Also, our aim is to pay for all the children under our Kids Program. We managed to establish a mobile library to assist our children in their learning programs during the holidays. Our main aim is to grow this establishment into a research center at some point. However, the library still needs books relevant to the curriculums of our children. Plus just general books to help grow the reading culture.

Home Learning:

This program complements the scholarship program whereby our qualified volunteers administer lessons to our children. This program not only carries subjects learned in school but also has experiential learning-based programs, grooming programs and soft skills programs. This program is very essential as it prepares our children for life. They are assisted in their studies, homework and exam preparations. Our volunteers are equipped with enough but relevant material as a result they are not so far from the standard curriculum. We are also excited that our new members came in and introduced new activities that are rich in lessons.

Sports and Games:

Now that the Covid-19 regulations are flexible, we are able to resume our sporting programs where we get to scout for talented kids and nurture them in their area of skill. We now host trainings and games for our teams on weekends but daily during the school holidays (like now until early September). We have soccer, volley-ball and netball as our main sports so far. However, we would like to have more sports on our roster to appreciate variety and allow our children to exploit their gifts and talents. We highly appreciate your support in this field as we have managed to buy some of the required equipment for these sports to be a success. However, more support is needed so that we may develop facilities for other sports and acquire the required equipment. We are still looking for volunteer coaches to support and train our teams. Though the situations get tough, you have stood with us through your support. Measures of battling the novel corona virus have been reduced to a bare minimum allowing us to re-engage the bulk of our programs back into action. However, we remain vigilant in the fierce battle against the pandemic always teaching our children to exercise caution and avoid the further spread of the virus and continue to remind them of the need to stay safe. We then seize this opportunity for life lessons and cultural cultivation concerning societal influence on child marriages and drug abuse. We try as much as we can to raise awareness and assist children educationally that being intellectually and socially. Once again, we say, Thank you!