A few months ago I wrote about my roomate, Justin Zoradi who started an organization called These Numbers Have Faces, a non-profit providing scholarships for students in South Africa. Many of you jumped in and supported his work. We actually hired Justin at The Mentoring Project as our Director of Communication. He works for us part time, and still manages These Numbers as they grow and provide more scholarships.
I wanted to share something of a celebration video with you regarding one of their students, Anda Sozawe. Anda is the organizations first student to graduate! Congrats Anda, and congrats These Numbers Have Faces. Great work!
Thanks so much for sharing this with us Don!!
I am a South African following your blog with great joy & pleasure and with a little more now after discovering the awesome work that THESE NUMBERS HAVE FACES is doing for South African kids. I was expecting to find a South African amongst the TNHF team but surprisingly there isn’t. This amazes me! A bunch of highly educated (check there cv’s) American kids working extremely hard to provide an opportunity at a future for kids way at the tip of Africa. Well done TNHF for being determined enough to consider “…the least of these…” even though they are not your own and oceans away from you.
It is awesome to know that we are children of God and not of Africa or America or… Such love and support, unfortunately, is rarely offered by my own people to those locked in poverty in South Africa.
Our new Government decided poverty could wait when newly elected President Jacob Zuma’s Inauguration Celebration was conceived. A reported R75 million (not much in $$$ but TNHF will know how massive an impact that kind of money can make on poverty in South Africa) was spent such obvious necessities a music concert, with a sound rig and stage that even U2 would have felt threatened at the sight of. Some of SA’s most over-payed musician’s kept the celebration swinging while junk food was on hand for hungry revelers.
Millions of Rands, for a bit of pomp and ceremony and a party for “the nation” or rather the 20 000 or so who could actually afford to get to the capitol city is regrettably very hard for me to swallow. Especially when you consider that R75 Million would build 1500 RDP houses for shack-dwellers or provide 205 480 families with a loaf of bread every day – for a year. Yup.
Thank you THESE NUMBERS HAVE FACES for doing, with such great determination & spirit, what our leaders could so easily have done had they only stopped and taken the time to prioritize the poor majority above the elite minority.
However, this is Africa, but i love it anyway.
in HIM
Travis
Pretoria
Sunny South Africa
The pastor that couldn’t admit he was wrong was afraid of getting voted out of the lifeboat. That’s what it reminded me of. This was actually hard for me to read for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I can see in myself that it’s hard for me to admit my mistakes. And, like the pastor, it is because I’m hugely insecure because of things that happened when I was a child, etc … It’s something I’m working on definitely. I’ve had a close friendship end recently because both of us actually refused to admit that we were both wrong. Anyhow, thanks for sharing! Blessings!
Also, when are you coming to Kansas City??? I read somewhere it could be September or October this year?
This comment was meant to be posted on the Fog of War post by the way. Not sure how I got that mixed up. Great documentary by the way too.