The Children
We have increased the number of children that Grains of Hope will be supporting in 2014, to 40. This is a huge leap of faith. We will be reliant on the Holy Spirit and all of you, dear people to assist us in raising the funds necessary to achieve this goal. The funds we provide will be used to pay teachers’ salaries, food, transport and a share of the overheads at the pre-school. The children range in age from 2 years old to 6 years old.. They are drawn from very poor families in the surrounding area. Some are orphans, some are HIV positive, many come from desperate situations, normally at best a single parent still resides at home. Often that single parent is HIV positive, unemployed, and in some situations has turned to alcohol for solace from the misery of their situation.
The children thus face many problems in growing up in the environment in which they find themselves:
Transportation:
None of the families from which the children come have any form of transport. The children have to be picked and dropped off every day they attend the pre-school.
Food:
They receive very little by way of nutritional food at home. More often than not they live on scraps and left-overs.
Love:
Many orphans are given no love, in fact they are considered a burden and often used by the host family as low cost labour.
Clothing:
Again often third-hand or worse.
Having attended the pre-school for a while however, the children inevitably thrive, brighten up and start interacting within the group. Their lives are changed!
See below for pen pictures of four of the children we have been assisting: