season’s greetings from Emmanuel, South Africa
More news from Emmanuel Advice and Care Centre … good honest appreciation of the year’s highs and lows, achievements and contributions from several of our volunteers, as well as appreciation of the joys and challenges of the year ahead …
Estolene’s newsletter follows:
Before we are going to our annual leave I would like to inform you once again about news at EACC.
On 27th November we had our candlelight memorial service. We had a very nice ceremony. To get an impression, you can have a look at 3 short videos from Anne who volunteered at EACC within the last weeks. Thank you Anne!
Please see
On 28th November the Department of Social Development had a function at Keiga. 7 of our elderly had been invited to it.
On 29th November we celebrated the graduation of 6 crèche children. Thanks to a donation Jean we were able to celebrate the graduation in an adequate way. Thank you Jean!
Anne took some nice photos.
Please have a look at our Photo Gallery.
Anita and Thembeka attended computer training and have just received their diplomas. Now we’ve hopefully got two new computer experts! Trez, thank you for your support!
We need to do a proper bookkeeping for the Department of Social Development, but also for Ubutyebi Trust who sponsored our car. It’s mandatory for us that an auditor checks it once a year. This happened in November but cost us 8,000 Rand. That was a lot of money for the organization.
From 10th to 12th December, Vuyo will attend training on gender based violence. That’s still a huge issue in South Africa! The training will be conducted by the Department of Social Development.
Overall this year 2013 was once again very challenging for EACC.
As the Department of Social Development only pays our stipends at the moment but nothing else, we need to look for donations all the time in order to be able to run the project also in future. In this situation we are once again not able to conduct all our services properly. For example we had to stop the preparation of meals for the Orphaned and vulnerable children (OVCs). As long as we could run the kitchen, we distributed up to 250 meals per day to the OVCs. Many of them now don’t get a warm meal every day.
Only thanks to the food bank of Port Elizabeth and Johnson Controls we were able to run the kitchen longer than expected. They often helped us out with food. Thank you very much for your support!
We also don’t know yet if the Department of Social Development will still fund us from April 2014 on. Let’s wait and hope!
In 2014, we plan to have an awareness door to door campaign on TB defaulters and to educate the community more about the stigma HIV/AIDS. EACC also plans to network with other stakeholders and organisation to make this event successful. Also to mobilise community, youth to inform them about danger of drugs they use if they are on ARV and TB treatment. Human trafficking plays also a big role in our community as well as Substance abuse; most especially our children became the victims of abuse. We hope for your continued support in the future.
I want to thank you for your support this year. We appreciate every single email from you as it shows us that you are still interested in us and our daily work. This means a lot to us!
In behalf of EACC I wish you merry Christmas and all the best for the year 2014.
God’s richest blessings!
Kindly regards
Estolene Esau
Project Manager
EMMANUEL ADVICE CARE CENTRE