Thembelenkosini Library

In our efforts to recruit the best possible  coaches to join our Grassroot Soccer Soweto family, we exhausted pretty much every resource we had available out here. And while many of the people and organizations we went to were extremely helpful, there was one person stood out above the rest.

Khosi

Khosi, a women that Thato – one of our Community Program Coordinators knew – provided us with a vast network of qualified young adults she knew throughout Soweto. This provided us with a deep and talented applicant pool and gave us the opportunity to select the coaches who would best deliver our program in local schools.

In continuing to get to know Khosi, we learned about an organization she had founded in Seaoane, Soweto that serves as a community center for orphans and vulnerable children, Thembelenkosini Care Givers (Thembelenkosini means "Trust in God"). AJ and I were inspired by Khosi’s compassion and commitment to her community and decided that we would help the center in whatever way we could.

Before...

 

After checking out the room that the kids of TCG often studied in, AJ and I decided that it could use a bit of a makeover. Hence began the renovation of the Thembelenkosini Library.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve been blessed to win a few poetry competitions, perform at some great shows, and even make a video of a poem I’ve done. I’ve been even more fortunate to receive monetary compensation for many of these. And while this is internship certainly doesn’t cut me a lucrative paycheck – or any paycheck at all for that matter – I’m the kind of person who doesn’t really need all that much stuff anyway. So rather than use the money I’ve gained from poetry gigs to buy some stuff I didn’t really need, I figured it would be better to use it to buy the paint and materials we’d need to renovate the room.

Due to the fact that work has been extremely busy lately, we had to settle for working on the library on weekends.

Now I don’t claim for AJ or I to be any experts when it comes to the craft of painting – I actually consider myself pretty artistically inept – but I think both of our dad’s busted our butts enough growing up to drill the basics of painting into our systems (shout outs to Big Daddy Smith and Papa Grant).

Careful not to get paint on the new dreads coming in...

Pops will tell you this was all his doing...

After a few long Sundays, some spilled paint, a couple ITunes playlist blasting, some more spilled paint, some help from Tizzy and Thato, and a bunch of little kids begging to leave their own mark on the project, the Thembelekosini Library came out better than I think any of us anticipated.

Call me Lil' Van Gough...

The final touches...

There’s only one thing left to complete the project…BOOKS. And lots of them. These kids are so eager to learn and read, but unfortunately they don’t have a great deal of books to choose from at the moment. And the center is struggling for monetary resources.

They were alot better at this than I was

This is where you come in! If you have old children’s books (ages 3-17) laying around the house or know someone that does, toss them in a box and send them to:

Clinton Smith, III

6610 Marigny St.

New Orleans, LA 70122

I’ll be home for the holidays and will work out a way of getting them back over to South Africa.

Or if you’re in South Africa and are interested in donating just shoot me an email at cwardsmith@gmail.com and we’ll work something out.

Whooo!!!

AJ and I have also been busy building a website for the center: http://www.thembelacaregivers.org/

We don't claim to be any experts with web design either, but we figured it was a decent start.

Please consider donating

Please please please consider donating books to Thembelenkosini Care Givers, it would mean more to these kids than you’ll ever know.