Breede River Winelands Rotary Club

Kits for Kids, Challenges for Children & Tools for Teachers... !
Rotarian Bill Allen, from St Albans U.K., while visiting relatives in McGregor a few years ago, saw a pre-primary school struggling to look after do...

Name: Helen Gooderson

Membership: Ordinary Member

Profession: Events Organiser

Interests: Music,Art,Personal Development, Theatre, Heritage

Visit to Sonneblom Gardens

Our club members recently visited Sonneblom Gardens - one of the most valued community projects in Montagu which has received assistance from us periodically over the past 5 years....

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Bonnie People

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Our main focus this year will be to assist Bonnie People, a community development project in Bonnievale, Western Cape, South Africa. It assists the inhabitants of a "squatter camp" (informal settlement) situated in a little valley on the edge of Bonnievale. The project invests especially in the needs of the children and acts as guardian for the people of the squatter camp.

Bonnie People strives to care for all the children of the settlement at all possible levels, whether it be food, daily care, schooling, clothing, transport, developing social skills, building self-esteem and trust or just simply feeling loved and cared for.

In the short term, the volunteer workers endeavour to:

* expand the Nursery and Kindergarden
* expand the Youth Activities incorporating more formal training
* develop the food-growing project incorporating home gardens in the settlement
* create adult skills training that can lead to entrepreneurship

In the longer term the aim is to

* build a primary school that will teach children in their mother tongue
* develop the settlement into an environmentally appropriate, sustainable community.

The seed for this Project was planted by Rotarian Heidi van der Merwe, a well-respected Bonnievale resident who has spent the last 15 years volunteering her help to surrounding communities.

For more information, see: www.bonniepeople.co.za

BRWRC support for Hospice

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The Breede River Hospice provides palliative care to people with life-limiting illnesses in the territory of the Breede River Winelands Rotary Club, situated in a rural area of 1600 sq kms, comprising five towns and a population nearing 100 000. A large proportion of this population is unemployed and many more have extended households living from a single salary.
The Hospice gives care and management to dying people, maximising the quality of life, minimising pain & ensuring human dignity in the last phase of life. This care is offered irrespective of age, gender, religion, race, sex, handicap or financial resources. It deals with cancer, HIV/AIDS, motor neurone disease, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer's disease, as well as other chronic illnesses, such as recovery after strokes, and frail care.
Care is provided both at patients' homes all over the above per-urban 'territory' - 14 000km are travelled in an average month - in collaboration with the family and their own doctor. At the Hospice headquarters in Robertson nursing, medication, health monitoring and general & bereavement counselling are also available.
At the start of 2009, a team of 11 medical professionals, 17 community care-givers and 10 support staff were servicing over 300 patients. This team was highly skilled and motivated . However the facilities, equipment and transportation, which the staff depended upon for efficient and timely service delivery, were mostly old and inadequate by modern professional health-care standards. Excessive time and effort were wasted , both by professional and support staff, in having to use primitive and old-fashioned management systems, methods and equipment. These factors were having a seriously negative impact on the potential growth of available services, and their efficient delivery, which are demanded by an explosion in patient numbers in the area.
This project aimed to remove these deficiencies by providing a wide range of equipment items.

Support for REAP

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RCBRW has been working with an organisation called REAP - the Rural Education Access Programme (www.reap.org.za). They identify promising disadvantaged young people (of all racial groups) who are studying for their matric, encourage them to believe that higher education is possible, guide them through application and support them through university or college.

There are many hundreds of young people whose families have no concept of higher education and are too poor to even think of supporting them. Our Rotary club has facilitated REAP's work in the Breede River Winelands area by using the name of Rotary to bring together the Principals and Careers Teachers of our local high schools at a social occasion and inviting the chief executive of REAP, Clairissa Arendse, to talk about their programme. This simplified REAP's access to the schools and they have recruited several promising young people in the few months we have been working with REAP in 2009.

Food Security Development

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The Breede River Winelands Rotary Club's Flagship Project is Food Security. Our aim is to assist in the development and support of food security in our region.
The Montagu Food Security Gardens (Sonneblom Gardens) produces quality vegetable produce for the general public and the disadvantaged in need of food. Additionally it supplies vegetable seedlings in the hundreds of thousands to various community programs across the Western Cape of South Africa. Our Rotary Club, together with the Distell Foundation and Claremont Rotary Club, are the Principal sponsors of the program.

Wheelchairs for needy recipients

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To date, the club has collected funds and donated a large number of wheelchairs to needy people, including the Montagu Hospital, Hospice, McGregor Family Centre, Bram Care Centre, Uitvlucht Retirement Home and various private individuals in the community.

Emerging young Golfers

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The Rotary Club of Breede River Winelands (BRW) has recognised the need to give some of our local youth the opportunity to participate in the wonderful game of golf - many aspire to but do not have the means to take part.
To support this goal, the club, with the assistance of a local coach, Barry Preston, decided to take some of the youth under our wing with weekly coaching sessions.
After roughly two years down the line, the progress among the children (most of them senior school learners) is heartwarming to say the least.

Literacy for all

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The project provides Xhosa-language readers to 160 Xhosa-speaking pupils at 2 lower primary schools in our region, at Ashton (Zolani) and Robertson (Nkqubela) during the first 3 years of school.
The aim is to improve the literacy level, especially in these previously disadvantaged schools in South Africa, where it is very low. The target area is the first three grades of primary school, because then it will have a positive impact all the way through the remainder of a child's school life. Improved literacy will play a crucial role in fighting abject poverty and unemployment.

McGregor Family Centre

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The McGregor Family Centre provides a pre-school for 25 children and education for another group with severe learning difficulties such as foetal alcohol syndrome and dyslexia. In 2008 they needed to register with the Department of Education but had insufficient toilet facilities. Working jointly with M.F.C. trustee Barbara Jacobs, Rotary BRW upgraded and expanded the sewerage and toilet system to meet the Dept of Ed requirements. Seen in the picture(s) are Past President Ruud De Clercq, Eve Bryant the Centre Manager, and Barbara Jacobs

Leadership weekend

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20 Head Boys and Head Girls from local schools enjoyed a weekend at the Eco Impact Centre on the Breede River near Drew. They learnt teamwork in solving problems, they learned about themselves in negotiating high-rope traverses (even the Rotary President did that one!), they had paintball fun, they camped out for the first time in their lives and they made lots of new friends

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