Posted on April 18, 2010 - by Paul Williamson

A Kitchen for New Life Daycare

Silence has been in contact with Susan who runs the Tshepang programme in Johannesburg. Susan helped Silence to obtain funding from Old Mutual Bank to enable her to purchase supplies and labour to build toilet blocks to the required ratio (1 toilet per 15 kids) in order to obtain minimal ongoing government funding. All the building supplies have arrived, she is now searching for a good builder to start construction.

We spent one and a half days at New Life day care this time and constructed a new outdoor kitchen for Silence. Her old kitchen has been a concern for some years – we had done some minor patch-up jobs on it on the last 2 trips, replacing logs which had been eaten completely away by termites, and patching up the roof which provided barely any protection.

The new shelter we built has a mildly-reinforced concrete slab floor, wind-proof corrugated iron walls and a full roof with overhang to protect from the rain. It’s surrounded by a stone-filled trench to ensure any water runoff does not make it inside to the floor during rain.

When we were creating the concrete slab on Sunday we found that the water tap was not running, so we had to walk hundreds of metres to the local dam and fill containers with water in order to proceed.