Events of the past few weeks in HBC

SIYAKHULA HCBC
-Cares from Siyakhula provided Ngonyameni families who were caught by lightning, from ward 26 with food parcels.The food parcels were costs R500 for each family.
-The Munincipality and Siyakhula's carers are working together to create a structure of stakeholders of Ngqeleni so that the stakeholders will be able to better support eachother.
-Auditors visited Siyakhula to check their books and found no flaws! This is really good news as it means they have an excellent chance of renewing their Social Development funding.
-The water tank at Siyakhula has been broken for some months and so carers have been having to fetch water from the river in order to cook for the OVCs. This week two carers were fetching water from the river and fell into the water ruining their cell phones. Both TransCape and Social Development are working on fixing the water situation at Siyakhula so they no longer have to fetch water from the river.
- Social Development also said this week that Siyakhula needs to make changes to their OVC soup kitchen as their office is not the appropriate place because it is at the edge of the ward and lots of kids are unable to walk to the office and so miss out on the program. They are planning to work closely with the support groups to effectively reach all the kids so the soup kitchen does not have to close.
-Siyakhula carers received Tshirts from both TransCape and the Kei wave in Mthatha, the place where they bought the 80 school uniforms.
-Lastly they have begun fixing the thatching on the roof of their office after working with a rather large hole in the roof for over a year.

PHILISA HCBC
-Lindelwa held a workshop with the carers to show them how to clearly understand the hospital book of a client. Understanding the hospital books will help the carers keep the clients from defaulting on their treatment.
-They also continue to collect reports and documents for social development.
-Philisa was able to do an awareness campaign at the funeral of one of their clients this week. Their client was very open about her HIV status, however she had been taking her medication incorrectly which led to her death.

MDUMBI HCHC
-Mdumbi is trying to organize a big awareness day, which they were hoping to have at the end of March, however because of lack of funding they have postponed it until May.
-Their leader, Ntombifikile, attended a conference in Mthatha on the 24,25, and 26 about human rights. This was held by Themba.
-After 3 months of waiting we received a responce to the NPO Status Application that we sent in to social development. The application was denied unfortunately, but for a very minor error, we were missing an ID number, so we are going to fix it very quickly and send it back. Here's hoping!

All The Groups
- All 3 groups attended the first workshop in a series of trainings and mentoring held by SPF on April 6&7. They will learn organizational skills as well as some home based caring skills throughout this course.
- This week we were able to distribute condoms, disposable nappies, and kits to all HBC offices. The kits are from the Department of Health and were unfortunately extremely inadequate. Not even enough supplies for one caregiver. So we are now looking into new options for kits.