Visiting orphan child charity project

Child charity supporter, Lisa Robson recently spent time at the SOS Children's Village Tlokweng, Botswana. Here she describes what happened.

In June 2009 I was lucky enough to spend 2 weeks living and volunteering in the SOS children’s village in Tlokweng, Botswana. This is one of three SOS Children's Villages within Botswana. Myself and my friend Beth had organised this via UNA Exchange, a Welsh charity and Botswana Workcamps Association (BWA) .We were working as part of a group for one of BWA’s international projects. For the first week there were 5 of us: myself and Beth from the UK and 3 Batswana (people from Botswana)- Colour, Precious and Shaka. In the second week we were joined by Amanda from Finland. The village very kindly put us up in a house on site which meant that we were surrounded by kids for the whole 2 weeks and got to learn a lot about the village and Botswana’s culture in general.

The village had 187 children living there at the time of our visit. The village was made up of 16 family houses and 3 youth houses (for those aged 18+ and still in the education system). Each house has a mother and an assistant mother, both of whom are employed full-time by SOS, and the houses really do have a homely feel eating meals together, sitting around the TV together and doing homework together.

We spent our days working within the village in various ways. Each morning we went to the on-site nursery school. The SOS Nursery School has 4 classes and takes kids from the ages of 1 and 6, when they head onto primary school. The children that attend the nursery school are either living in the village or are from the local community as part of a “Family Strengthening Programme”. All children attending have been identified as at risk by social workers. I really loved our mornings in the nursery school, both the time we spent with them in class and in the playground. It was really reassuring to see that all of the kids seem healthy, and more importantly, happy. It was also a shock to see how much small children can do without the constraints of western health and safety rules! I can honestly say I learnt a lot from the kids here.

Afternoons were spent doing chores to help the village more manually. This included tidying/organising and cleaning the library, cutting long grass around the football pitch so the kids didn’t hurt themselves running into it and general maintenance/ collecting litter.

Evenings were spent helping the older kids with homework either in their homes or in classes ran onsite for those nearing exams.

At the end of the 2 weeks in Tlokweng, I really did not want to leave. I felt very at home in the village and had formed some strong bonds with the people there. I hope to visit SOS Tlokweng again at some point in the future.

SOS Children has been working in Botswana since 1986 and there are three unique children's villages in the Southern African country at Tlokweng, Francistown and one being developed at Serowe, around 250km north east of Gabarone.

You can support children in Botswana by becoming a child sponsor or fundraising for children in Botswana.