Hello our kind friends!

Thank you so very much for your kind and amazing support you have given us since May this year! We really are so grateful as this has helped us include more children who are in need of support unto our group and provide bereavement support and care for even more children in the area.

The children are doing very well and have retruned back to school today for their last and final term of 2011! The project is going well, the children anre growing and developing, watching the transformation in them is just inspiring and truly special. Their little income generating scheme has brought in some money which has helped the group continue and has also assisted some children in getting to school.

Thank you so much for your support and if you are thinking of coming to Africa, please come and visit us!

Dear Friends of Island Hospice

The children have just finished their first term at school and are in the final weeks of their school holidays. With the lovely summer rains, our crops have been growing well and should be ready and ripe for harvesting soon.

During the holidays Island Hospice held some children's holiday groups and workshops throughout various communities in which we work. The groups were facilitated by an Island hospice Social Worker and Nurse under the observation of Jenny Hunt, a Social Worker who advises and mentors our team.

The children's groups went really well, with many of the children enjoying the teas and sandwiches we had to offer, as well as the support and play therapy. Most of them said at the end how much it helped them and how they loved the time we spent with them.

I have attached a picture of the ground nut site which are growing in the Chikwaka area. These are linked to our Youth Project and when they are ready they will be harvested, toasted and ground into peanut butter. The peanut butter will then be bottled and sold in the local community. The idea behind this is not only to generate a small income for the youth to go to school but also to encourage and strengthen the local economy within the community.

We also have some exciting news!!  

Island Hospice has partnered with PSI in providing free and mobile HIV Testing in the communities in which we work. This is a massive achievement for both organisations and provides the communities in which we work with a service free of charge, thereby increasing their access to ART Therapy and Opportunistic Infection treatments.

Thank you for your support - we look forward to welcoming you to our projects soon!

The boys and girls who have benefited from the amazing donations through Global Giving have now completed their school year and are moving on to the next grades. The new school term has started and the children are doing really well. We have been fortunate enough to receive complimentary donations for school shoes and stationery from Rotary International which has really encouraged the children and motivated them to get to school! We have already completed a Psycho Social Support Group this year and are now in the process of forming a peer to peer support group where the children can support each other at a community level. We hope to run eight of these groups throughout the year. This will be complemented by a sustainable livelihood project and a sport project where children will learn how to grow vegetables in a community garden and they will also learn about HIV, Sexual Reproductive Health Awareness and Bereavement support. The children really are interested and are engaged in this new project development. Its been great so far! Thank you for your support and next time we will put up some pictures of our vegetables grown in the community garden!

Island Hospice has been paying fees for orphaned children. Some of the children had been out of school for a period ranging for a year to three. While it was a welcome development, it has proved that readmission into school present the children with a number of challenges. Some of the challenges are stigmatization emanating from having been out of school, struggling to adjust to school routines and coping with the school work. Island Hospice is running support groups were the aforementioned issues are openly discussed, normalized and addressed through the group setting. Thank you so very much for your support. The children are now getting access to a basic education which will equip them with skills to tackle their futures.

Island Hospice has been offering therapeutic group work and support in the Harare suburb of Mufakose to 20 bereaved children, and their guardians. The group work activities focused on assisting the children to process their losses, and the guardians were supported in their difficult task of caring for these vulnerable children. Of major sadness to both guardians and children was their inability to attend school, owing to unavailability of funds. Through the funds from Global Giving, the fees for a few of the children were paid. This intervention had an enormous impact on the sponsored children who were able to derive purpose, hope and esteem from attending school. In removing this obstacle of disappointment, they have been freed to more fully process their losses during the therapeutic group work. The observation has emphasized the benefits of twinning of clinical group work with other practical interventions (funds permitting).

Hello to all our wonderful supporters and herewith a report on the last 6 months of Islands SOZ Support for Orphans in Zimbabwe project.

Thanks to your support, we have been able to work with orphans and their guardians in 3 different communities, with the majority of the guardians being over 60 years of age. These tend to be grandparents struggling with the responsibility of their children’s children in terms of school fees, uniforms, medications, feeding and of course their emotional daily care. The majority of these orphans are also HIV+.

One of our guardians is a grandmother who now is responsible for the 15 orphans of her 3 deceased daughters. She is exhausted permanently with the constant visits to the clinic, reminding the children about their ARV’s (that we managed to access free from a donor project) and the ongoing demands of caring for 15 children aged between 6 and 13. In an attempt to address all of these children needs , Island networks with other agencies that provide services that we do not.

This grandmother reports that both the individual counseling and our community support group are extremely helpful. What we are seeing in general is hugely improved communications between the guardians and the children they are caring for. They confirm that they are finding it easier to talk to the children about their illness, their status and why they have to take medication.

The Guardian Support Group sought to engage primary caregivers of bereaved and HIV positive children in psychosocial support. Twenty (20) women caring for over seventy (70) children were engaged in six (6) group sessions. The focus was on understanding and working with the complexities associated with caring for these vulnerable children and to offer therapeutic support to these guardians.

Feedback from the group members contained great appreciation of this intervention, seeing it as a positive deviation from the usual NGO programs focusing only on material provisioning. Among other positives, the group was said to have created a sense of togetherness, a realization of not being alone. The group members provided enormous support to each other and an opportunity to focus, for a change, on themselves, and the expression of emotions they rarely have the time or luxury of addressing.

Given the success of this group and its impact on both the guardians and on the orphans they care for, it is our wish to replicate this program to all our areas of our operation.

The warmest of greetings and gratitude to you all for your wonderful support in helping Island to get its new Globalgiving project up and running. The great news is that thanks to you all we were successful in meeting our targets and have therefore been offered a permanent place on the Global giving website! This will assist us enormously in our efforts to fund our work on a sustainable basis. Our orphan and guardian initiative will start in the Mufakose suburb of Harare where we have identified 20 guardians who have requested our help. This programme will therefore impact immediately on 20 families comprised of the natural children of these participants, and the orphans to whom they have offered their homes.

We will post some photos as the group progresses in order to make you feel a part of this process.

From all of us at Island, but more importantly from those that your funding will help, I thank you.