Teresa and I are only days away from one of the greatest adventures of our lives and a new way of celebrating the Christmas season and all the wonderful blessings we have. This year, and for as many more as we are financially able, we’re committed to sharing with others throughout this small world those blessings we and our country have enjoyed. So, we’re headed to South Africa for three weeks over Christmas and New Year’s, and we wanted to share our plans and excitement with you.
“South Africa?” you ask. “How did this come about?” Last January, Teresa visited South Africa for two weeks as part of a cultural retreat with organizations in Africa dealing with women’s issues. She shared a cabin with the director of South African Female Empowerment, Nonswakazi Sgwentu. They became friends for life in their first few minutes together.
In March, Nonswakazi stayed with us for two weeks as part of a fund-raising and speaking trip to the US. Jim bonded quickly with her, too, and when she left, we longed to go South Africa once again. We are friends with a number of nuns from the Sisters of Humility and they offered to give Nonswakazi’s daughters scholarships to attend private schools here in Cleveland for a semester. We’ve been working on making that happen ever since. To make the trip easier on them, we decided to take the opportunity to visit South Africa and bring the girls back with us.
While we are there, we will see a number of areas, including Durbin and the Eastern Cape, where Nonswakazi grew up as a black farm slave under Apartheid. We’ll have a chance to visit Kruger National Park, one of the premier wildlife preserves in the world. This will be Nonswakazi’s family’s first vacation together. We will travel in a rented mini-van with Nonswakazi, her husband Maboy, their two daughters, Evelyn (15), Thania (13), and their son, Cipho (8).
We will also spend time in the townships around Cape Town, where Nonswakazi lives now. Her organization, SAFE, works with women in these communities on micro-investment and rape crisis counseling. We will be staying in a flat on the ocean-front and meeting with colleagues and friends in the area.
When the girls return with us, they will stay in the two bedrooms we have just refinished. Evelyn will attend school at Magnificat High School just a couple miles away, and Thania will go to St. Raphael’s Middle School only two blocks from our house. They will attend until June when we hope to bring Nonswakazi and Maboy to the US to travel back with them.
We will be taking the girls on a number of trips during their stay. Blacksburg, DC, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Michigan, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Bradford are all places we hope to visit in the five months we have with them.
One of our goals is to give Evelyn a chance to connect with a number of universities here in the US so she can get scholarships to study here when she graduates. The only ticket out of poverty in South Africa is education, and Nonswakazi’s family has made huge sacrifices to send the children to good private schools. They know that the US has the best universities in the world, and that they can help themselves and their homeland most by getting the best educations possible.
We will do anything we can to help them with this, and we would welcome you to do so as well. If you would like to visit us while they are here, have us visit you, take the girls shopping, on a weekend trip, or other cultural or educational activity, please contact us! If you’d like to support them, their family, or SAFE in some other way, contact as well! If I can get access to the internet from time to time while we are there, I will post stories here. If I can’t, there will be many stories when we return!
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and much love!
