News

One Month, Many Miles

One of our future Scholars outside her home in Mkhoba, Kwa Zulu Natal

At Raise the Children we accompany our Scholars on a journey from surviving to thriving. Tataisa (tah-tie-ee-sah) in Setswana means "to help each other move forward." In this context, we feel that Tataisa is a fitting name for Raise the Children's new digital newsletter. Rather than a collection of e-mails that arrive in your inbox over the years, our newsletter site will both send you e-mails and curate the stories of many journeys. It provides a single place that you can visit to stay up to date with our work. Please take a moment to read the articles below and also explore other stories on the site.

The families and homes of a few of our incoming Scholars, as well as some of our team doing research and psychometric testing.

In the past month alone, our team has journeyed more than 2100 kilometres (1300 miles) on the road to meet our incoming Scholars in their homes. We have many more miles to go. Above, you can see a few images of the places we have visited and extraordinary people we have met. The very short video below also gives a sense of how far some of our Scholars live from the road, and in turn, from school. (This Scholar and her family actually have to collect and carry water for their home on this path each day.)

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The path to one of our Scholar's homes from the nearest gravel road.

This is life-changing work. After we visited one prospective Scholar's home, our psychologist looked at me and said "Paul, we have to take her," as tears slowly slid down her face. It was evening. The home we had just left had no smell of food or evidence of an evening meal despite the many children and gogo (grandmother) living inside. The highest level of education in the household was Grade 10, and the young girl who had achieved that milestone was nursing her baby during the visit. She has still not managed to move forward to Grade 11. The nearest tar road was a 40-minute drive away. A symphony of crickets and frogs filled the night air.

"Don't worry. We will," I replied.

You helped open that door. With your support, as funders, partners and advocates the trajectory of a young girl's life has been radically altered for the better. Thank you for walking with us on this journey. We look forward to many more.

With gratitude,

Paul | CEO

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