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Knitting for Africa started with the thought that we can all make a difference. In this case we can help a few of the thousands of orphans in South Africa whose parents have died from Aids and left them with nothing.
A nursing sister in Johannesburg, Carol, came into contact with Aids orphans through her job and was so affected by their plight that she resigned, used her tiny pension and in blind faith set out to help a group of 40 children. Carol is working in Soweto, a sprawling area outside Johannesburg with a population close to 4M. Sadly these children are shunned by their communities and treated like lepers because of the stigma of Aids.
Two years ago Carol approached Trinity Methodist Church in Linden (a suburb of Jhb) and after hearing her story the congregation offered to help her. They regularly donate food, clothes and blankets to help keep families of children with no parents going. Sometimes children as young as eight or nine are head of the family.
Carol now has 600 children under her care and the outreach programme (Ikageng Itireleng) is growing slowly to help these desperate children by providing food, education, shelter and offering love in a harsh environment. There are many of these programmes - but not enough - and the contribution we can make is to knit squares for blankets to send to South Africa to help these people who provide a lifeline for otherwise helpless children.
Unbelievably there are 600 deaths from Aids or Aids related illnesses in South Africa a day, that's 215,000 a year. A large proportion of people who die are adults, which means that there are thousands of children left to fend for themselves.
It is impossible for us to imagine how poor the poor in South Africa are. They have no houses; they live in shacks made out of tin, cardboard, scraps of wood, assorted bricks and any other material they can find. They have no toilets, windows, doors or running water. They have no ovens, fridges or heating. The winters in SA are harsh; although it can be warm and sunny during the day, from 4pm until the sun rises the following morning, temperatures can dip below zero. And in some parts of SA rain lashes down all through the winter months. Not how we imagine life in 'sunny' SA to be!
The South African rag trade has been hard hit by imports from India and China so there is a massive import duty on cloth items. Sadly our blankets are affected by this which is why we ask business travellers and visitors to the country to take a few blankets at a time with them.
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