This week’s SoroptiVoice blog comes from Grace Meyer, a Soroptimist from SI Maluti in South Africa. She has been a Soroptimist since the launch of the Maluti club on 9 September 2008 but her connection with Soroptimism goes back over 20 years! For many years she has been involved in a project to develop the literacy skills of children in poor communities in South Africa. Starting with one training centre in Pretoria, designed by Gunilla Rommerskirchen from SI Lund in 1989, the project is now looking to expand to reach children in Maluti where her club is based.

Many children
in the poor communities of South Africa were not being stimulated in the
formative years of their lives. Together with a colleague called Flora Oates, we founded an organization called Edutak
Pre-School Training and Development. The Edutak Training Centre in Pretoria was
built so that women from remote rural areas could attend training courses in Early
Childhood Education and return to their communities to start pre-schools and
Educare Centres for children.

Gunilla Rommerskirchen, the president of SI
Lund in Sweden who was in South Africa at the time (1989), designed
and built the Edutak Training Centre. She is an expert in project management, consutruction and design. Three years later she returned to Sweden but we have kept contact ever since.
I have visited Sweden three times to
spread the news about our projects and Gunilla has brought groups of women
to South Africa to visit the projects here.

For the past 25 years we have
been training women to become pre-school teachers at the Edutak Training Centre
near Pretoria. As a continuation of this programme we are now
delighted to be developing our work to reach out to the communities in which
these women live to support parents and grandparents.

Most of the homes in these poor
communities have no suitable books, pictures, or stimulating
toys and games for children. The parents cannot help their children as they are
also illiterate. They cannot give them the stimulation required to develop literacy
skills at this critical stage of their development

 We have developed a phonics-based early
literacy programme that can go a long way in uplifting the language and maths
skills of these children in the remote rural areas of South Africa. With this programme we can
make a difference to the lives of these children.

The programme is aimed
at children from the age of two and can be used by mothers and grandmothers not
only for their children but for the children of their relatives and neighbours
and for the mothers and grandmothers themselves, many of whom who are
illiterate. The vision of the programme is to see a kit of the materials in every impoverished South
African home where there are children and adults who can benefit. The kit includes: A manual, Picture cards, Matching
sound/letter cards, Matching word cards, Sets of letter cards to make words,
Matching game, Number cards and 15 Graded readers.

The cost of the package is 105.81 Euros per person. This includes learning and teaching materials,
training, administration, follow-up workshops. 
Each participant will share this knowledge with community members so
that in the end thousands will benefit!

Five years ago the Maluti Soroptomist Club was started in
Bethlehem South Africa. The first president of the Maluti club, Wanda, heard about Gunilla through
a friend in Cape Town. Gunilla told Wanda about me, living in Clarens near Bethlehem
where Wanda lives. This sounds complicated but it’s just wonderful how
everything fits in! So it’s through Gunilla that we, together with other members, started the
Maluti Soroptimists.

The area of Maluti is one of the areas where we would like to implement
these workshops and provide each participant with a kit of learning and
teaching materials.  The numbers of
participants will be limited to 20 per workshop so that individual attention
can be given to each participant. The initial one-day workshop will be followed by monthly
workshops for consolidation, reinforcement and new ideas. We plan to empower 500 people during the next
two years – Educating, empowering and enabling!

For more information visit: www.edutak.co.za