On Friday we had our office Christmas party and before receiving our secret santa gifts from our fellow office mates, we made 100 Christmas crackers from scratch for the Red Cross Children's Hospital. There are so many kids in that hospital that needs attention and love from all of us and it was great being able to contribute to their Christmas in such a little way.
Saturday, Shihaam and I organised a food/toy and clothing drive to Masiphumelele. Masiphumelele is a township just outside of Noordhoek. We support Yandiswa, a wonderful lady who runs a soup kitchen and looks after 40 kids daily. We collected 12 bags of clothing (for all shapes, sizes and ages), a bag of shoes, 5 parcels of food and a bag of toys. We allocated 3 very poor families and gave each a food parcel and between them they divided all the clothes. The rest of the food and toys went to the Soup Kitchen and the Peacock Creche just around the corner. They repeatedly thanked us and were extremely grateful.
Salome (in Korea) had her class kiddies make Christmas cards for all the kids and when we gave the Masi kids their cards they didn't let go of it once. They loved that someone far away made cards especially for them. We played with the kids and had lots of competitions with cool prizes for the winners. Thank you to everyone who contributed to making this day so special! Next year we will choose a few new places for Easter, June/July and again Christmas.
Sunday a few of us organized a braai at the Durbanville Children's home for the kids who doesn't have anyone to go to over the Festive Season. We raised R5000 in total and bought ingredients for a chicken and hot dog braai, salads and braai broodjies. We got a list of names from the orphanage of 26 children and we bought each child a personalized gift. Each child got lots of stationary, dolls (girls), cars (boys), toiletries (soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, roll on, spray, lip gloss), t-shirts (boys), sweets, chips, cutex (girls), 'waslappies'and back packs. The kids were so happy with their presents, they kept wearing their back packs for the rest of the day. One of my friends came as Santa Claus to surprize the kids. The little ones were very happy and excited about this and kept on hugging him and sitting on his lap. The older ones discovered very soon that it was Jacques but still enjoyed hugging and talking to him. We got a sponsorship for a jumping castle that gave endless enjoyment to all the kids - including myself :)
Once again, thank you to everyone for making this day possible and for making it so special. I'm sure the kids will remember this day for a very long time. Just before we left all of them asked us to please visit again. If you would like to be involved in our next visit please let me know. The more the merrier. We are going to try and go back for Easter.
It was such an emotional, yet most amazing weekend ever! I wish we could do this every single day!
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