Soweto was just a word associated with danger and death. I’ve heard many warnings not to enter there and I expect the corresponding danger. Soweto! But it’s not dangerous at-all. We take a bus to Nelson Mandela’s place, a boring concrete museum, and ask for some NGO operating in the area. They send us to the Ikageng Centre a couple of blocks away. By the way we are with Rodrigo from Argentina who is interested in our way of traveling.
The Ikageng Centre serves a large community in the Soweto area (South West Township). It is located in a part of the township that has been substantially reconstructed and has paved roads. They explain us the biggest problems the people here are coping with on an everyday basis. Lack of education, AIDS, teenage pregnancies. And they introduce to us the programmes they run to tackle these issues. We decide to support Ikageng and hope to incorporate it in our future initiative to send spontaneous volunteers, individual low-key travelers who just want to help out. There is more they can do than we realize.
The next day we visit the place again but there is not much going on. Judging by all the facilities and programmes they are offering, they do have accumulated a great amount expertise. We hope that one day, other start-up NGO’s can benefit from sharing this expertise.
Have we made our point? This was Charity Travel Africa for now. We’ve seen some countries, we’ve missed some other countries, we definitely want to come back to this continent, we want to do more to encourage YOU to go there and help setting up any sustainable activity, help individuals strenghtening their African spirit while their corrupt leaders keep sucking in Western loans and wrong dependencies that drain creativity and a pride identity that is ready to venture beyond post-colonialism.