Phakamisa – South African Aids
PHAKAMISA is pronounced pa-ga-mee-sa.
A Zulu word meaning 'to uplift.'
PHAKAMISA’s grass roots work is community driven so our workshops reflect the expressed needs of the communities, equipping those caring for orphaned and vulnerable children
We presently work in a 50km radius of Pinetown.
There are 270 PHAKAMISA Caregiver Groups with over 1,700 members supporting over 6,000 orphans.
Each group has a leader who attends the training workshops twice a month, to learn a skill to teach her group back home.
Skilled trainers and monitors ensure that what is learnt in the workshops is implemented back in the communities, under pinned by emotional and spiritual support and practical resourcing. This leverage principle has enabled the project to impact many individuals and families.
At the start of a new training year each trainer introduces her course to the caregivers, who then choose what they want to learn for the year.
This is Nellie, our beadwork trainer, speaking about the traditional beadwork course using this dressed up doll (donated ) to demonstrate the items to be made and skills learnt..
Help us uplift adults and children living in poverty.
Phakamisa supports 270 Caregiver groups with 1700 members caring for 6000 orphaned or vulnerable children. 200 community and vegetable gardens providing crops for 1000 families.
Be uplifted by the singing of PHAKAMISA Caregivers. As they praise God.
Vegetable gardening is an important and integral part of our Caregiver programme.
Over the past decade PHAKAMISA has encouraged impoverished communities to utilise unused or waste land, turning them into vegetable plots and provided the training, support and seeds (at a nominal price) to enable Caregivers provide free nutritious food for their families.
Vegetable gardening is compulsory for Caregiver leaders, with theory training given by Monitors in the classroom backed by practical demonstration in the PHAKAMISA garden.
Today PHAKAMISA supports 200 vegetable gardens in the communties we serve. Regular visits by our Monitors to these gardens reinforces learning and is an opportunity for them to give helpful advise.
Regular draught conditions, little access to piped water, poor sandy soils and few garden tools or fences make vegetable gardening a real challenge. Composting, mulching, intercropping and organic pesticides are a few of the solutions offered to the gardeners.
At PHAKAMISA, God comes first. All workshops are preceded by Devotions, where we share our joys and sorrows with each other and God. This spiritual and emotional support is a vital component in the holistic approach of PHAKAMISA and is a time for Educare students and Caregiver leaders to come together.
In response to the changing needs of communities, we have included Parenting Skills to our workshops.
Alexia leads these supportive and informative classes which are very necessary with the parenting of orphaned and vulnerable children falling on the shoulders of elderly people.
New for 2012 are our Literacy Classes. Lessons in literacy will replace Home Based Care which we've taught for the last 4 years and has helped the caregivers in caring for the sick, elderly and dying. Our new Literacy Classes will equip carevigers to tackle problems encountered in their daily lives and communities which they currently struggle with due to a lack of literacy.
Nellie, a skilled beadworker trains Caregivers to make traditional Zulu beadwork for ceremonial use.
This skill enables Caregivers to produce beadwork which is saleable within their communities and again enables a small income.
Our new gym classes run as part of the PHAKAMISA day before devotions (7.30am). These classes include lots of stretching and relaxing and are proving incredibly beneficial./p>
Our cooking and nutrition trainer Zola, teaches nutritious meals preparation; how to pickle and bottle fruit and vegetables and how to bake.
These skills enable Caregivers to feed their extended families in a nutritious manner, develop independence and become
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