A few months ago, a woman named Keletso Mokongwa approached me with an idea: to open up an after school center for orphans and vulnerable children in Shoshong. She identified an abandoned building and has been funding the entire thing from her own pocket. We got a lot of the community involved in painting and cleaning the house. The idea behind the center (named the Dorcas Centre) is to provide some needy children with support that they may not otherwise have. Everyday after school they come to the Centre, get a hot meal, play games or get tutored in subjects they are having trouble with.
The other beautiful part of planning to open the Centre was the ability to do manual labor on a daily basis. For the past 3 months, I painted every few days. It was great staying busy. And because I was there most days, it created a lot of awareness about the Centre. Everyone was asking what we were planning. It was great exposure for Keletso's cause.
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| Keletso and Dikgang before we got started (Dikgang is a good friend of mine and one of the people who helped us plan and paint from the beginning) |
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Here I am blocking my face because the house was SO dirty. Before we cleaned it, the ceiling was filled with bat droppings and the entire place was a mess. Keletso got a cute pic of me here cleaning.
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Scraping off the old paint and starting afresh
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Boitshepi and others
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| Tumelo and Nonofo |
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| My PC friends Stephanie, Cassie and Amanda came for a day to help paint |
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| If you need any convincing that it gets COLD in Botswana, check out what we're wearing! |
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