Monday, August 23, 2010
Hello guys
We had a good board meeting on the 13th of August. We discussed a lot of issues which are bothering part of our team. Workloads are immense for some team members, important things don't get done fast enough and Co-organisations giving us headaches but the team dealt with it well and after a 4 1/2 hour meeting we had a great gathering all together at Siyaduma restaurant for pancakes and a cold beer. Very rewarding!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
TransCape is boiling!!!!
Every time I drive into the Ngqeleni district to do Microfinance I pass all my friends on the road or see them working on construction sides or their car in front of clinics. I wave and feel accelerated about the work force and the passion TransCape has got. Yes we are moving and in the right direction. Hey we are busy making this world a better place!!!! Thanks, Astrid
Monday, July 12, 2010
News after the last meeting
Hi everyone,
last Friday we had our meeting at the coast and 11 people attended. Not only the board was present, also volunteers were keen to hear news and contribute to the projects. I was very glad to hear that some funds came into our account after having a long drought in May and June. Thank you for all the donations, guys! The projects are doing well and Hyman was able to send of a blasting report about the first 6 month of the new holistic HIV/Aids program. Well done ,team! The bad news is that our Donor Relation Officer, Dominique, is on her way out and we are looking for replacement urgently.
Cheers yours Astrid
last Friday we had our meeting at the coast and 11 people attended. Not only the board was present, also volunteers were keen to hear news and contribute to the projects. I was very glad to hear that some funds came into our account after having a long drought in May and June. Thank you for all the donations, guys! The projects are doing well and Hyman was able to send of a blasting report about the first 6 month of the new holistic HIV/Aids program. Well done ,team! The bad news is that our Donor Relation Officer, Dominique, is on her way out and we are looking for replacement urgently.
Cheers yours Astrid
Monday, June 28, 2010
Up-Date
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful team we have got. The financial crisis has also arrived at TransCape and it is getting very hard to obtain funds for our Projects. The big Projects like the Education Center and the HIV program are consuming big chunks of money every month and the project mangers and fundraising team have to work literally day and night. I was expecting the meeting to be absolutely stress full because we are running so short but the team just holds it together, makes appropriate adjustments and we are certain to find a solution for any problem. This last week we see a bit of light on the end of the tunnel. Our Dutch friends are the saviours and also one of the German groups promised to help us in August. Plus I received an e-mail from a 72 year old man from Australia who wants to fund raise for us through a 1000km bike ride along the west coast of Australia. He has got a hip replacement, osteoarthritis and diabetes! I just think WOW! If you want to support him please contact me! Thanks, yours Astrid
I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful team we have got. The financial crisis has also arrived at TransCape and it is getting very hard to obtain funds for our Projects. The big Projects like the Education Center and the HIV program are consuming big chunks of money every month and the project mangers and fundraising team have to work literally day and night. I was expecting the meeting to be absolutely stress full because we are running so short but the team just holds it together, makes appropriate adjustments and we are certain to find a solution for any problem. This last week we see a bit of light on the end of the tunnel. Our Dutch friends are the saviours and also one of the German groups promised to help us in August. Plus I received an e-mail from a 72 year old man from Australia who wants to fund raise for us through a 1000km bike ride along the west coast of Australia. He has got a hip replacement, osteoarthritis and diabetes! I just think WOW! If you want to support him please contact me! Thanks, yours Astrid
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
New chairperson
TransCape has got a new chairperson. I want to officially introduce myself. My name is Astrid Gifford and I'm a board member of TransCape since 2006. I have been working on TransCape's Microfinance Project and still manage this project as well.
It is a big honor for me to be the chair of this beautiful organization and I ll do my best to keep everyone up-dated on Blogger, on what is happening in TransCape. Soon our monthly meeting is coming up again. I m looking forward to hear all the progress we have been making since our workshop in April. Our fundraising team worked super hard on proposals and identifying potential donors for our Health and Education Projects. Our new HIV/Aids coordinator Grace, has settled in nicely and worked herself through the piles of information about our holistic HIV program. She is doing well with all that workload and the team and people love her to bits already.
Love to you all, yours astrid
It is a big honor for me to be the chair of this beautiful organization and I ll do my best to keep everyone up-dated on Blogger, on what is happening in TransCape. Soon our monthly meeting is coming up again. I m looking forward to hear all the progress we have been making since our workshop in April. Our fundraising team worked super hard on proposals and identifying potential donors for our Health and Education Projects. Our new HIV/Aids coordinator Grace, has settled in nicely and worked herself through the piles of information about our holistic HIV program. She is doing well with all that workload and the team and people love her to bits already.
Love to you all, yours astrid
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Another, long over due update on whats going on at TransCape:
All going well this side, dynamic and busy but well.
My laptop was stolen, then I got a new one, rebuild it then that crashed after two weeks and I had to start all over. Was a good test for my backup efficiency which seems to have past with good colours.
In the mean time I resigned as chairperson because I want to go build my house. Astrid took over the job for now. She is very ampt but I warned her properly that it can become very busy. I have all the faith in her and she is definitely much better with people than me.
I will be available to assist her all the time. I am also still the treasurer, data collector and web master. Please always feel free to still contact me about anything.
Grace is now our new HIV coordinator. She seems to be capable and is very good with the team. She loves to be out in the field and to work with people.
Roger and Judith arrived from New Zealand with the VSA volunteer program and jumped in to help with our education program. They are stunning people and seeing that they are staying for two years could be of immense help to us. Roger took over the IT responsibilities at our Mdumbi office and is doing a great job. Judith is exploring what she can bring to the pre school.
Andries is another volunteer who arrived to help with fundraising, an area which was neglected for a while as we were all so busy implementing. He is stacked with work.
So, see what I mean with dynamic, or is it diverse? Many changes but the foundations are solid. Our local teams who are mainly responsible for implementations are growing stronger and stronger and the few permanent TransCape board members are standing strong and motivated.
In spite of my laptop problems, with the support of two Dutch volunteers, I was able to get our new web site launched. Have a look at www.transcape.org. Still lots to be done though.
I also had time to do some upgrades to our database especially for the HIV side of things. The database is extremely helpful in the capturing of all the HIV statistics.
A summary of these statistics:
Separate Events Visitors
Soccer events 12 10697
Community AwareDays 3 2200
School AD and Work Shops 11 1575
Total 26 14472
All events totals Visitors Avg/event
People attended events 14472 557
Male 7858 258
Female 6700 302
People tested at events Percentage People Positive Percentage
Total 1371 9.5 of visitors Total 116 8.5 of tested
Male 446 32.5309993 Male 41 35.344828
Female 925 67.4690007 Female 75 64.655172
Soccer Games Played 69
Teams Participating 55
Distribution
Male Condoms 9350
Fem Condoms 1443
HIV Pamphlets 1443
PMTCT Pamphlets 577
TB Pamphlets 448
Support Groups
Total members 372
Total groups 19
New members since Jan 39
New members directly from Awareness event since Jan 19
April Stats
Members attending meetings 320
Female 280
Male 53
Average meetings/group/m 2.8
Home Based Care groups
Total members 69
Total Groups 3
Total clients 875
March Stats
Members visiting homes 32 all female
Visits 456
HIV Positive clients 107
Clients on ARV’s 80
TB Clients 76
Clients on TB treatment 74
OVC clients 220
Child headed household clients 33
Bedridden clients 29
Frail and elderly clients 90
Disabled clients 69
Pregnant clients 35
Client deaths 12
About the HIV program:
We did a pre family survey in ward 22 and interviewed just more than 80 households, the head of the house and as far as possible one scholar per household. It will be interesting to see what difference we made as soon as we did the Post survey. We also started doing interviews with some of the people who tested positive at one of our events to compare their experience of living with HIV to people living with HIV outside of our area of activity.
Prevention program is doing better than expected all a long.
For some or other reason the number of people testing positive has dropped significantly. You will see in the stats that the percentage of people testing positive at our events has now dropped to just over 8%. We are trying to figure out why this is so much lower than what was expected. So far there are the following suggestions:
• The existing statistics we estimated our figures on are faulty
• Ward 22 which we focused on for this first six months has had lots of attention and most people know their status and are well educated
• People who are really worried about their status are to afraid to come for testing
• Faulty testing kits
The nurses will soon start using a new batch of testing kits. I can’t understand why at the first four events about 20 people tested positive per event and then it suddenly dropped to only 4 for all the following events.
We will also have the last four events in ward 22 in very deep rural area to see if that makes a difference.
Anyway, in spite of that, we are testing more people than expected with the highest amount at one event 166.
All the soccer group play offs are done and we having the semi final knock outs between the 12 winning teams of the group play offs, this weekend. Seems like we will have TV and news paper coverage for this event, building up to the finals in August. We have extra testing kits and gift packs ready expecting more numbers of attendants than at any previous events. We are also being interviewed for local radio.
We have two committed international teams flying down for the finals so far.
The community events are doing well, giving government a chance to jump on board and tick off a responsibility on their list, at our costs of course. He he he. We have representatives from Dept of Health, Social Development, SA Police Service, Agriculture and sometimes even other groups like child care organisations, religious orgs and municipality. At the one event we had a very motivated councillor who challenge by example everyone to test. It was when we tested 166 people.
School events and workshops also on schedule. The children participate immensely and find the sessions very informative.
Support Program is also actually doing better than expected seeing that 4 more groups were started than what we planed in ward 22. They know though that we won’t be able to build meeting huts for them.
All three meeting huts that we are building, are in progress with the first one almost completed.
The support groups seem to be growing in numbers, probably because of the attention they are receiving through this program. They approached us with the idea that they want to do more in their community. They suggested to do kind of concert events where community members would be invited to and could pay an entry fee. We are documenting these events and will include some footage with the semester report.
They have many ideas to generate income and we are looking into it as ways to get the groups sustainable. We have started Micro Financing the members of the first two groups. Their training are in progress as we speak.
We have also applied for funds for fences for all the newly build meeting huts including a 25 x 50m garden area. We have applied to a donor who installs water tanks to donate the installation of water tanks at all our HIV groups new buildings.
Home Based Caring Program is on schedule. All groups have their NPO status and their applications are in with Dept of Social development. Another 10 members of the Mdumbi group went for their SANTA training and completed successfully.
Philisa’s office is finished and we only still need to buy the furniture and equipment and have the hand over launch. See statistics of the HBC group activities in the attached document.
Treatment Program still continuing as before with out funding. He he he. There are now 579 male and 947 female on treatment of which 63 male and 44 female are children. About 250 adults have been down referred. The children are having their monthly meeting today where we do a program with them and feed them lots of healthy cooked food.
About the Education program
Yho, we need funds for our education center urgently. We've got maybe 2 months left to keep going. I worked out the other day that this program is giving free education to about 500 people yearly, including adults, scholars and pre schoolers.
The early childhood development side (pre schools) grew to five pre schools. The after school enrichment program and adult education is soon to include basic computer skills in word, excel, publisher and basic internet, e-mail and computer education.
The ABET program could maybe end sometime next year as most students in our area got out of it what they can. This would then very appropriately be replaced by the computer education.
Hospital Upgrade
We are soon to start with phase two of the TB ward upgrade and renovation at Canzibe Hospital.
Our Plan for phase two:
Week 1
28 June –2 July - Removal of windows and replacement, Installation of air bricks, Digging of foundations and building walls at rondavels TransCape
Week 2
5 July – 9 July - Removal of windows and replacement, Installation of air bricks, Laying slab and building walls at rondavels, Plastering inside rondavels TransCape
Week 3
12 July – 16 July - Repairing damaged plaster, Removal of door frames and replacement, Repairing of ceiling, Roof on rondavel extension, Plastering walls of extension. Week 4
19 July – 23 July - Painting of doors and frames, Completion of windows, plastering and painting , Completion of ceiling repairs, Rondavel new floors and repair doors and windows.
OK, that’s it for now. For more info visit our web site at www.transcape.org where you will find project specific blogs for updated information about each project.
Greetings and thanks for the interest. Please help spread the word of the difference any small group of people can make if they would only think in terms of community and not only themselves.
Hyman
All going well this side, dynamic and busy but well.
My laptop was stolen, then I got a new one, rebuild it then that crashed after two weeks and I had to start all over. Was a good test for my backup efficiency which seems to have past with good colours.
In the mean time I resigned as chairperson because I want to go build my house. Astrid took over the job for now. She is very ampt but I warned her properly that it can become very busy. I have all the faith in her and she is definitely much better with people than me.
I will be available to assist her all the time. I am also still the treasurer, data collector and web master. Please always feel free to still contact me about anything.
Grace is now our new HIV coordinator. She seems to be capable and is very good with the team. She loves to be out in the field and to work with people.
Roger and Judith arrived from New Zealand with the VSA volunteer program and jumped in to help with our education program. They are stunning people and seeing that they are staying for two years could be of immense help to us. Roger took over the IT responsibilities at our Mdumbi office and is doing a great job. Judith is exploring what she can bring to the pre school.
Andries is another volunteer who arrived to help with fundraising, an area which was neglected for a while as we were all so busy implementing. He is stacked with work.
So, see what I mean with dynamic, or is it diverse? Many changes but the foundations are solid. Our local teams who are mainly responsible for implementations are growing stronger and stronger and the few permanent TransCape board members are standing strong and motivated.
In spite of my laptop problems, with the support of two Dutch volunteers, I was able to get our new web site launched. Have a look at www.transcape.org. Still lots to be done though.
I also had time to do some upgrades to our database especially for the HIV side of things. The database is extremely helpful in the capturing of all the HIV statistics.
A summary of these statistics:
Separate Events Visitors
Soccer events 12 10697
Community AwareDays 3 2200
School AD and Work Shops 11 1575
Total 26 14472
All events totals Visitors Avg/event
People attended events 14472 557
Male 7858 258
Female 6700 302
People tested at events Percentage People Positive Percentage
Total 1371 9.5 of visitors Total 116 8.5 of tested
Male 446 32.5309993 Male 41 35.344828
Female 925 67.4690007 Female 75 64.655172
Soccer Games Played 69
Teams Participating 55
Distribution
Male Condoms 9350
Fem Condoms 1443
HIV Pamphlets 1443
PMTCT Pamphlets 577
TB Pamphlets 448
Support Groups
Total members 372
Total groups 19
New members since Jan 39
New members directly from Awareness event since Jan 19
April Stats
Members attending meetings 320
Female 280
Male 53
Average meetings/group/m 2.8
Home Based Care groups
Total members 69
Total Groups 3
Total clients 875
March Stats
Members visiting homes 32 all female
Visits 456
HIV Positive clients 107
Clients on ARV’s 80
TB Clients 76
Clients on TB treatment 74
OVC clients 220
Child headed household clients 33
Bedridden clients 29
Frail and elderly clients 90
Disabled clients 69
Pregnant clients 35
Client deaths 12
About the HIV program:
We did a pre family survey in ward 22 and interviewed just more than 80 households, the head of the house and as far as possible one scholar per household. It will be interesting to see what difference we made as soon as we did the Post survey. We also started doing interviews with some of the people who tested positive at one of our events to compare their experience of living with HIV to people living with HIV outside of our area of activity.
Prevention program is doing better than expected all a long.
For some or other reason the number of people testing positive has dropped significantly. You will see in the stats that the percentage of people testing positive at our events has now dropped to just over 8%. We are trying to figure out why this is so much lower than what was expected. So far there are the following suggestions:
• The existing statistics we estimated our figures on are faulty
• Ward 22 which we focused on for this first six months has had lots of attention and most people know their status and are well educated
• People who are really worried about their status are to afraid to come for testing
• Faulty testing kits
The nurses will soon start using a new batch of testing kits. I can’t understand why at the first four events about 20 people tested positive per event and then it suddenly dropped to only 4 for all the following events.
We will also have the last four events in ward 22 in very deep rural area to see if that makes a difference.
Anyway, in spite of that, we are testing more people than expected with the highest amount at one event 166.
All the soccer group play offs are done and we having the semi final knock outs between the 12 winning teams of the group play offs, this weekend. Seems like we will have TV and news paper coverage for this event, building up to the finals in August. We have extra testing kits and gift packs ready expecting more numbers of attendants than at any previous events. We are also being interviewed for local radio.
We have two committed international teams flying down for the finals so far.
The community events are doing well, giving government a chance to jump on board and tick off a responsibility on their list, at our costs of course. He he he. We have representatives from Dept of Health, Social Development, SA Police Service, Agriculture and sometimes even other groups like child care organisations, religious orgs and municipality. At the one event we had a very motivated councillor who challenge by example everyone to test. It was when we tested 166 people.
School events and workshops also on schedule. The children participate immensely and find the sessions very informative.
Support Program is also actually doing better than expected seeing that 4 more groups were started than what we planed in ward 22. They know though that we won’t be able to build meeting huts for them.
All three meeting huts that we are building, are in progress with the first one almost completed.
The support groups seem to be growing in numbers, probably because of the attention they are receiving through this program. They approached us with the idea that they want to do more in their community. They suggested to do kind of concert events where community members would be invited to and could pay an entry fee. We are documenting these events and will include some footage with the semester report.
They have many ideas to generate income and we are looking into it as ways to get the groups sustainable. We have started Micro Financing the members of the first two groups. Their training are in progress as we speak.
We have also applied for funds for fences for all the newly build meeting huts including a 25 x 50m garden area. We have applied to a donor who installs water tanks to donate the installation of water tanks at all our HIV groups new buildings.
Home Based Caring Program is on schedule. All groups have their NPO status and their applications are in with Dept of Social development. Another 10 members of the Mdumbi group went for their SANTA training and completed successfully.
Philisa’s office is finished and we only still need to buy the furniture and equipment and have the hand over launch. See statistics of the HBC group activities in the attached document.
Treatment Program still continuing as before with out funding. He he he. There are now 579 male and 947 female on treatment of which 63 male and 44 female are children. About 250 adults have been down referred. The children are having their monthly meeting today where we do a program with them and feed them lots of healthy cooked food.
About the Education program
Yho, we need funds for our education center urgently. We've got maybe 2 months left to keep going. I worked out the other day that this program is giving free education to about 500 people yearly, including adults, scholars and pre schoolers.
The early childhood development side (pre schools) grew to five pre schools. The after school enrichment program and adult education is soon to include basic computer skills in word, excel, publisher and basic internet, e-mail and computer education.
The ABET program could maybe end sometime next year as most students in our area got out of it what they can. This would then very appropriately be replaced by the computer education.
Hospital Upgrade
We are soon to start with phase two of the TB ward upgrade and renovation at Canzibe Hospital.
Our Plan for phase two:
Week 1
28 June –2 July - Removal of windows and replacement, Installation of air bricks, Digging of foundations and building walls at rondavels TransCape
Week 2
5 July – 9 July - Removal of windows and replacement, Installation of air bricks, Laying slab and building walls at rondavels, Plastering inside rondavels TransCape
Week 3
12 July – 16 July - Repairing damaged plaster, Removal of door frames and replacement, Repairing of ceiling, Roof on rondavel extension, Plastering walls of extension. Week 4
19 July – 23 July - Painting of doors and frames, Completion of windows, plastering and painting , Completion of ceiling repairs, Rondavel new floors and repair doors and windows.
OK, that’s it for now. For more info visit our web site at www.transcape.org where you will find project specific blogs for updated information about each project.
Greetings and thanks for the interest. Please help spread the word of the difference any small group of people can make if they would only think in terms of community and not only themselves.
Hyman
End February 2010 report on our HIV program
Our new HIV project is going very well.
Some basic statistics until end of February:
Prevention:
- Soccer Events: 5
- Soccer Games Played: 33
- Teams through to Semi Finals: 5
- Community Events: 1
- School Events: 1
- School Workshops: 1
Tents for testing
Winning team
Statistics:
People attending events 5842
Male 2906
Female 2836
People tested at events
Total 459 Positve 78 Persentage 16.99
Support:
· We are supporting and training 13 Adult Support Groups, 1 Children Support Group and one Support Group Forum. We will start 7 more support groups in the following two years.
· We are supporting and training 3 Home Based Care groups. We will start 1 more
Treatment:
- We have 1300 adults and 94 children on ARV treatment and down referred 184 people who are on treatment to Canzibe feeder clinics.
Construction:
- The first new Home Based Care office for Philisa is halfway build and we started with the first support group rondavel for ward 22 this week.
We only received 2/3 of the funds we need for this project from the Danish Embassy in SA. We urgently need the following to continue with this project for 2010:
- At least one more vehicle – R100 000,00 (10 000 euro) The Wild Coast Theatre bakkie just broke again last weekend, we have to get it fixed before Saturday else we can not do the next event.
- Construction extras – R70 000,00 (7 000 euro) Fences, water tanks and theft proofing for
- Operational extras – R50 000,00 (5 000 euro) Administration materials, air time, transport and labor extras like nurses fees for doing testing on week ends.
This project is working towards having the HIV/AIDS epidemic controlled in the Canzibe feeder area.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)