On behalf of all the children at the schools and orphanages, THANK YOU for your Beanie Baby donations.  The following will hopefully give you an idea of just how much impact something as small as a Beanie Baby can be.

Katie Shook, along with her Dad, visited the Mvulo Day School in the heart of Soweto.  Although the houses within this large suburb of Johannesburg are small, people able to live in Soweto are very fortunate relative to many in South Africa, given Soweto’s safe, community atmosphere.  Most of the kids at the Mvulo Day School have at least one parent who works, and the school receives a small payment from the families to demonstrate commitment.  The school houses roughly 200 kids, aged 3-7, which up until last year were all housed under this one small roof.

The kids benefit from a solid lunch at school (sometimes their only meal of the day), and were quite happy to see visitors.  Most were desperate to have their picture taken, as they loved to immediately see themselves on the back of our digital camera. 

When the Beanie Babies were given out in each class, the energy level really took off.  Most kids had never had a toy of their very own, and with such a variety of animals in the batch it was evident how excited and special each child felt.

We did feel a bit badly to have completely disrupted the normal flow of the school (and these teachers did run a TIGHT ship!!!), but overall, it was clear that with your help we had made all these great kids feel incredibly special.

Friday had a completely different tone but as a result it was probably an even more memorable day.  On this day, we traveled into the center of Johannesburg, in the part of town designated “the Bronx” by the locals, and appropriately so.  A colleague from Mr. Shook’s work escorted us, and told us that he indeed grew up in the neighborhood when it was a nice middle-class area, but over the past 15 years it had deteriorated severely, like so many inner-city areas. 

To illustrate the extent of the problems in this neighborhood, we drove past the home of a local priest, where we learned about the “Passion Box”, pictured here.

To provide an alternative to abandoning unwanted children on the streets (or worse), the priest had this special window installed on his front wall, complete with a crib, where one could place their child, no questions asked, and the church would work to find him or her the support needed. 

The home we visited that day was an Aids orphanage.  The orphanage itself was in a modest 4 bedroom house run by a retired nurse, and currently had 25 kids from newborn through to age 8.  The kids were either abandoned or their immediate families had died from Aids.  Nearly all of the kids were HIV positive, with some sick from full Aids.

We were introduced to the house’s most recent arrival, a premature baby that had been left at the door a few days earlier. 

We were told that the children go to a local school, although they need to be escorted by the nurse’s teenage son back and forth each day for safety reasons.

When we gave out the Beanies, the kids seemed more confused than anything, as they had never been given anything simply for themselves before. 

But as we stayed and played awhile, they began to understand and became more pleased, although it was clear that the energy level would never match what we witnessed the previous day because of their illness. 

They sang several songs for us before we left, and what was lacking in energy was more than made up for with smiles, love, and hope.  It was overwhelming to see these kids as optimistic as any despite the hand they have been dealt.