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Our 2015 trip was over the Easter holidays and we headed back to the Khaya Centre with a team to run a holiday club and undertake a video project. As ever we recieved the most generous and accepting welcome from the Khaya Centre staff and volunteers.

 

On our first day there we ran a team building day for about 50 teenagers in a beautiful park with a lake in Johannesburg. It was a huge adventure for these teenagers to be taken on a coach, out of their township, to beautiful open space for the day. We played all sorts of games and activities from egg throwing to hula hoop passing to walking on a rope! The day was a huge success and it was a privilege for us to know we had enabled these young people to experience something completely different for the day. 

 

On the Saturday we took part in a feeding programme in a local township called Pasting. This is an area where the people have very little; their houses are tin shacks, they have to collect their water, they have no electricity, they share 1 toilet between hundreds of people and they struggle to survive. We paid for, prepared and served a hot meal for their community. It was a day of bitter sweet emotions. It felt so great to be able to provide these people with a meal for which they were very grateful but at the same time it was heartbreaking to see how poor these people are.

 

Over the following few days we ran a holiday club at the Khaya Centre for the local children. 250 children were invited to come but word soon got out that something exciting was happening and on the first morning over 400 children and young people turned up! We sang songs, made crafts, played games and taught them the Easter story - a story which many of them had never heard before. The holiday club had many special moments but for me the best moment came later in the week as we heard them singing the songs we had taught them at the top of their voices as they were walking down the street!