Lifeskills for 2,587 Children in South Africa

Good morning, how are you doing?

I just want to share this week about what happened yesterday. We were invited to bring 40 young people together for a birthday party celebration for a local chain restaurant, SPUR. As part of their Corporate Social Investment commitment, they supported us at camp two weeks ago with providing SPUR burgers to the winners at the Camporee, and yesterday it was to celebrate 58^th birthday of SPUR in South Africa.

Yesterday, we were invited to arranged 40 young people to attend the birthday party, it was wonderful, the look of absolute delight on the faces of the children as they experience hamburgers for the first time, cheese on the burgers was something new.

Burger bread with a beef patty, wow, the usual meat for the rural areas is chicken, for the poorer people often crickets, mopani worms, spinach etc so having beef was very new for most of these kids. Then came the accompaniments, tomato sauce, chips with barbeque and thousand islands sauce, all new.

Then came desert, ICE CREAM!!! With sprinkles, what a wonderful exuberant response. None of the kids had never had soft serve ice cream.

Finally, birthday cake!!!!

I watched one young girl, only about 7, slowly take her spoon and scrape it over the cream in the cake and deliberately take the small amount on her spoon and put it to her mouth, she sucked on the spoon to get every morsel, and savoured it for 10-15seconds, slowly relishing every flavour and texture and then slowly move on to the next taste sensation. It was so beautiful to watch her deliberately savour every mouthful as opposed to the boys who just wolfed down everything on their plates in contrast.

The children were able to play on the extensive play equipment between courses and plus SPUR sang happy birthday with us all and then put up a wonderful song called following the leader which got the whole restaurant up to sing and dance. The children were absolutely agog. I have posted a video for you to see the generosity of SPUR and pictures so that you also can enjoy.

The children who attended the birthday celebration would never ever have been able to have this experience without the support from Spur. Their circumstances would just never allow this opportunity. Going to a restaurant is something that many of us take for granted, we may do it weekly, but to my embarrassment I forgot how privileged I am but looking at the children’s faces, I was very humbled and grateful for the life and advantages I have been given.

Thank you for reading this letter, I hope you enjoyed it

Blessings

Louise

Links:

• Following the Leader!
• Happy Birthday Spur and THANK YOU!