Whew! We have been busy! As the cold winter winds have come into the Cape Town area, at Living Hope we are on the move as much as ever! So much is happening at Living Hope during Level 3 Lockdown, and it is amazing to see all of the wonderful things that our staff have been doing over the last month. Here are some highlights:
- Our Health Care Centre quickly transformed one of its wings into a separate unit ready to take COVID clients, including the use of a piped oxygen system ready to support these clients if needed. Due to the global shortage of testing kits, clients may or may not have been tested for COVID before admission to our hospital, so it is necessary to keep these clients, and the staff that care for them, separate from the rest of the hospital. We are very proud of how our staff have adapted to meet the needs of these clients.
- Ongoing support has been provided to all of our employees during lockdown through stress management training and regular debriefing. We know at this time that emotional and mental health is very important, so our own Living Hope Trustee, and head of Living Well Counselling, Michelle Wanless and her staff, have been giving our staff the extra boost of encouragement, prayer and spiritual support that keeps them going through these difficult times. We are so grateful to Michelle for this wonderful service.
- Our alcohol and drug recovery programme has made new inroads during lockdown by running the 8 week programme at a local homeless shelter. 16 clients have already graduated from the shelter based programme, with 3 clients returning to their families, which is truly a miracle! Sobriety was maintained in these clients for the full 8 weeks! Management at the shelters have been very accepting of the programme with an open door, so after this successful trial, our staff will now be running the programme at the Kalk Bay shelter, and then at other local homeless shelters on a rotational basis, enabling them to reach more clients! This is a very exciting development!
- The chronic medication delivery service continues to run seamlessly with over 2800 packages delivered in June! We are so grateful to have this opportunity to connect with clients who otherwise would have to stand in a queue at the hospital or who are not able to get out of their homes for medication collection. Take a look at the pictures below to see how our teams in Capricorn and Masiphumelele are managing medication distribution.
- Food support and delivery continues through many routes and methods including food/grocery vouchers, food parcels, eeZeePaste™ NUT RUTF nutritional food supplements, Ndihluthi Stew distibution, and training and cooking with Wonderbag slow cooker technology. Living Hope has also facilitated the formation of the “Masiphumelele Relief and Care Forum” which has divided Masiphumelele into 22 different sections, each with a team leader who oversees 7 designated Wonderbag trained cooks in each section. A donation of Wonderbags were given to Living Hope, and we have already trained 130 community care leaders gifting them with a bag at the completion of their training! Each of the trained ladies are using the Wonderbag to feed up to 25 people each, which means about 3000 people are currently being fed by the Wonderbag Ladies! What a tremendous partnership!
We would not have been able to achieve any of this without the faithful support of our broader community, local business partners, church partners and individual donors who are giving financial gifts towards these efforts. Thank you for your giving in this very challenging time. We need your financial gift more now than ever before in our 20 year history. The needs are really beyond description.
