We Help Our Children

For the past four weeks, I have been working at an NGO called We Help Our Children. WHOC’s mission is to offer leadership and life skills training for children and youth mainly exposed to vulnerable and high risk situations. The programs focus on the holistic growth of the youth in the area, through camps and training programs. My worksite director is Karl Linderboom, and he is the Program Director at WHOC. He is very passionate about what he does, and his care for the youth of the community is contagious. Throughout my time in Wentworth so far, I have seen first-hand the need for programs for the youth to get them off the streets, and really get them talking about the problems they face in this community. Since I have been at WHOC, my main project has been the Peer Mentors Program. I have made PowerPoint presentations, edited learner manuals, and gone all over the city requesting donations from large companies to fund the program. As an NGO, WHOC must get all the money for the training through donations and community partners. I found that asking for money in Wentworth was harder than any engineering test I have ever taken at Duke. A few companies would let us talk to the boss, who would offer verbal support, but when it came time to fork over the donations, they apologized and said that it was a very bad time for their company. Most of the time, however, the secretary would look at me like I was speaking a foreign language (which I have been told I do, because of my strong “American” accent), then just tell us that the director was busy, and send us on our way. Eventually, we focused our donor search on companies where Karl had a personal relationship with the boss, and we ended up raising the money we needed on the last day. This money would pay for the hall hire, printing costs for the manuals, and refreshments for the learners. We also went to ten different schools in the Wentworth, Bluff, and Merebank areas to invite the schools to pick 11^th grade students that they thought would be great leaders and mentors in their school. Visiting ten schools in one afternoon was very tiring, but it was a cool experience to see that schools that were right down the road from each other had such different demographics of students and faculty. They would even treat us differently, as the schools that were primarily Indian offered us tea and biscuits, while the primarily white schools on the Bluff were all business.

            This week, I finally got to experience the fruit of my labor. We hosted the Peer Mentors Program at a local community center from 10-1 each day from Monday to Friday. There were about 20 grade 11 learners there, as well as Karl, Jarryd (a WHOC volunteer), and myself as the facilitators. I was a little nervous to begin with, as I often work with young kids, and not high school students. When I asked them how old they thought I was, most of then agreed on 26, and were shocked when I told them I was 19. I then explained to them that I had been in their shoes not too long ago, and found out that I was even the same age as some of the grade 11 students there. The first thing we did was ask the students what they thought were the main problems facing the youth in Wentworth. I was amazed to hear what the students had to say, mostly because they were the same things I would have said about the youth in America. When I explained to them that American teens also struggle with drugs, alcohol, sex and peer pressure, they were shocked. One of the girls even said to me, “But you guys are all rich!”. I laughed out loud and explained to them that the country as a whole may look rich, but that we struggle with a distribution of wealth problem, just like in South Africa. They were taken aback by the fact that there are homeless people in America, and that we do not all live like the people in their favorite show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Listening to these students this week has been such a great experience, and I really hope that the program is helping them to think about the choices they make, and realize that they can truly make a difference in their community, even if it is a small one. As Karl says, if we plant the seeds in 20 learners, and they each plant the seed in 20 more, and so on, then we will have a whole garden. I’m glad to be a part of the WHOC mission!