Call for volunteers

Many of you must be familiar with the television series Extreme Makeover – Home Edition, where families who are down and out, who have faced hardships in life or are desperately in extremity of a better and sometimes safer living space are surprised by a team who rebuilds, extends, upgrades and improves their home.

Well how would you like to take part in an ultimate makeover? I’m sure your immediate answer is yes, however this extreme makeover is not one that involves you or your inn getting upgraded, but this involves you making the lives of some very special children a whole lot better and giving their home an extreme makeover …

Woolworths together with MySchool is sponsoring some extreme makeover of the St Georges Home for Girls in Wynberg, Cape Town who cares for over 40 girls. This home is over 100 years old and is definitely in need of some TLC. Thanks to the Woolworths Food Youth Day promotion in 2009 this project is able to happen, it will be managed by NewKidz on the Block and Cape Core Construction.

The St Georges Home for Girls is a registered Children’s Home and is the only residential care facility in the Wynberg District who provides care instead of children who have been abandoned, neglected, orphaned or abused. Read more…

I’ve been home for about 2 months now, sorry on the side of the lack of updates. My intentions for this blog have wandered many times, and my focus has been lost.

Since I have been back the normal family and friends things have happened, but also something important has happened.

A family member has become unwell. This family member has also just had serious surgery and requires care and help from the family.

I am so glad I am home to help. I am close to this family member, and it has become every of influence part of my everyday to see them and help them.

Their decline in help was not foreseen, and was not in any degree of the reasons I returned home.

But being back home has become vital for now.

Travel plans continue to swirl in my head, but they do not even reach the draft stage. They are just ideas.

I went to our family home in Maadi the other day to see the tenants. As I waited in the hallway for Jane, I looked carefully around the house. We lived in that place for about 8 years. I did some very significant renovations in the house before our tenants moved in, but the sense of the firm that attracted us multiplied years ago still live in the house. Our tenants are a lovely Scots family with three children who have been with us for some years now. This is right, as it is a children’s home. The house itself feels friendly to kids.

As I stood in the hallway looking into my study, the living rooms, the dining room and the kitchen I had the greatest number extraordinary sensation. I felt as granting all my skin, inside and out, had been scraped raw. I wondered if I would want to live back here in “civilisation”, if I might want to be more in the center of things. But I realised that even standing in the hallway, I was being dragged back into my former life. I was looking at the front door wondering when my late husband would be walking through apologising for being rather late. I believe that it took a relocation to let me realise the importance of a new beginning of sorts. Read more…