By Louise and the KTD196 Dream Team | Jack of all trades, master of none!
Avuxeni, Minjani!
Greetings, thank you for taking the time to read this report. I hope you find it interesting!
Each week I think, "if I was donating to KTD196 what would I like to hear about?"
Today I thought you might like to hear about what the kids are doing during the school holidays. Each holiday period we put in extra activities so that the children are kept busy.
When we first started in 2003, I remember asking a group of young girls, all around the age 10-13yrs, I asked them why they thought Teenage Pregnancy was so high? Their comments were insightful and just so powerful. They all agreed that boredom was the cause. There was nothing else to do........!
I was gobsmacked. Something so serious could so easily be prevented. Yes, I know, there are a lot of other dynamics in play like peer pressure, trading marks for sex with school teachers, "blessers" which is a polite term for adults who pay for sex with young people through buying them gifts, basically transactional sex, however, the bottom line according to the children we work with is that boredom is at the root.
Even through Covid, our teenage pregnancy rate was 0, the rest of the country saw an explosion to 20% of all school-going girls becoming pregnant during this time.
So our strategy is to build in a morals and values foundation for these kids' lives and combine keeping them busy.
The school holidays are the most challenging however we plug in extra programs and activities to compensate.
In the second photo, you will see some recycled arts and crafts. Often times this is the first time the children have used paint or created anything craft-wise other than coloring in, usually with led pencils. In the series that follows are the kids preventing land erosion and keeping the road safe for taxis for when the rainy season starts. By keeping the children busy with worthwhile projects, the community is appreciative of the work done, they are happy, they treat the children with greater esteem, and are willing to contribute small amounts of money for the children to buy resources such as paint and glitter for other activities.
I have included a short video as a link and also other photo's for you to see the work they have completed just on one small section of the road. There are many other sections to have potholes filled in, edges cleared, litter to be removed.
I hope you will celebrate with us the effort these children go to in order to be useful and help others.
Blessings to you
Louise
Links:
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