By Philippe Talavera | Director
2024 started well. Our main achievement at the beginning of the year was to recruit two youth counselor interns. We now have a fulltime youth counsellor and two interns. They worked together from end January to end May. During that period, we attended to 756 cases. The internship program ended at the end of May. However, from July, we will manage to still have one intern with us. We also welcomed at the end of May our first Peacecorp volunteer, Ron, who will work with us on resource mobilization, particularly looking at the possibility of having income generating activities.
Last time, we reported about our ambitious project ‘looking through the lenses of street children’ thanks to the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. This is a project addressing the issue of street children. We have been working hard to organize stakeholder meetings, to sensitise Ministries and other organisations on the issue. We have also presented the film Lukas in schools and so far have reached 6131 learners. We have identified a number of learners at risk of dropping out of school and join the streets and our counsellor/interns are working with them. One example is:
In Gobabis a 14-year-old boy sleeps alone at home. His mother and his younger sibling go to sleep at his mother’s boyfriend’s place. The boy can go for days without eating. He goes to town to beg for food or money. Even though he doesn’t school in a school with a hostel, he wakes up early morning at 5 am to go to another school, Epako Secondary School, at the hostel to get food. He also goes there in the evenings for dinner and to take food back home if his siblings are there. The client feels like he is the bread winner as he is the older child. The mother drinks a lot and fights all the time with her boyfriend. The client also mentioned that his mother would tell him to drop out of school for him to beg. His older sister left school when she was in grade 8 and moved to Windhoek where she became pregnant and now also begs on the street at a shopping mall to survive. The counsellor did a house visit to assess the situation and spoke to a social worker to be able to register the household for food parcel and to see how best the client could get a placement in a school with a hostel. The counsellor also spoke to the Omaheke Governor to see how best he can assist. A formal letter was also sent to the governor to assist the client. Follow up is being done by calling the life skills teacher as the family doesn’t have a phone.
Thanks to Horizon Trust we worked with the Aramsvlei Youth Group in the ||Kharas region and they toured schools with their performance. Thanks to the Embassy of Finland, we are still managing the ‘Gentlemen and Supergirls’ project and organized school discussions around the photo exhibition ‘the caring Namibian man’ and community intergenerational dialogues in the north. This project sadly will conclude in September. Thanks to the Embassy of Spain, we could tour our piece ‘a picassiana dance’ to Gobabis. Thanks to Mercury Phoenix Trust we could organize a series of campaigns in Katutura, encouraging people to get tested and access PrEP. Finally, we had an exciting exchange program, with two trainers from Theatre for a Change, Malawi, coming to train the Koes youth group for a week.
We finally also managed to get a loan to buy a much-needed new car. So we can now travel safely again to schools. It however puts additional pressure on our resources, as we need to reimburse the car on a monthly basis. And sadly we still are unsure of what the future holds, as it remains difficult to secure grants.
We really thank wholeheartedly those of you who are still supporting us. We know times are difficult, and there’s many projects crying for help all over the world. We therefore value your support tremendously.
Our link are still: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/using-arts-educate-4000-namibian-teenagers-on-hiv
https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/help-oyo-buy-a-new-car
If you have any friends who may be able to support us, please do share the link. We greatly appreciate all the support we can get, no matter how big or small.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
