Over the years, we have maintained that Young Heroes’ food and clothing sponsorships help keep children on their homesteads, in familiar surroundings with the support of relatives and neighbors. This benefit of our program has been borne out by recent events.

Due to recent donations, we’ve been able to sponsor a number of children for the first time since their enrolment in 2007. When our Family Relations Officers informed some families of the good news, they found that the children had left their communities to look for alternative places to stay. In most cases, they either went to a homestead where they work as herd boys or maids to get money for food, or to look for jobs in town. In a few cases, young girls left school after becoming pregnant, to obtain support for both themselves and their children. In one family, four young girls left home and went to stay in town, and have had no contact with their family since.

This makes it very difficult for Young Heroes to locate these children, establish their sponsorship and then monitor them. We regret both their plight and the need to tell donors that we cannot find them.

In other cases, we have lost track of children residing close to the border in communities such as Gege, Nhlangano and Lavumisa after they left the country to take advantage of free education in neighboring South Africa. By supporting a Young Heroes family, you can help us in our efforts to provide assistance to the orphans and minimize such cases of migration away from their homes.

We're pleased to announce that Newman's Own Foundation has awarded Young Heroes Foundation a grant of $17,500. This will enable us to support over 40 orphans with food sponsorships for the year ahead, and to continue our education program by offering scholarships in 2010. We're deeply grateful to Nell Newman and all the people at the foundation for making this grant possible.

Bush Fire, the annual arts and music festival that supports Young Heroes, continues to go from success to success. This year’s event, held from July 31 – August 2 at House on Fire in Malkerns, was the biggest yet. Despite rain on Saturday, over 10,000 people turned out to enjoy Johnny Clegg, Busi Mhlongo, Vusi Mahlasela and a host of other artists from all over Africa.

Along with donating a portion of the festival’s profits, Bush Fire enables Young Heroes to receive significant publicity online, in the press and at the event itself, where festival guests bought over $1000 (E8,600) of our merchandise – and even sponsored four children on the spot.

The Mhlanga and Matsenjwa families of Lomahasha were recently visited by their sponsor, Cornelia van der Kuur from Canada.

Lomahasha is a hunger-stricken rural community that borders Mozambique. It has a large number of destitute families who came to Swaziland as refugees from that country’s civil war. Eventually, they were allocated land and Swazi citizenship, but the area’s problems with absorbing this new population has worsened its poverty and hunger.

Cornelia brought clothes for both of her families and food for the Mhlangas, as they are the more destitute of the two: Zanele, who is age 11 and in Grade 2, stays with her unemployed grandmother. Both the child and her caretaker were delighted to meet their “Good Samaritan” in person.

Recently, 17 students from the St Mark’s High School Charity Club in Mbabane, together with two of their teachers, visited the Tsabedze family at Nkwene, whom they are sponsoring.

Club patron and teacher Ms. Nonhlanhla Nkambule explained that the purpose of the club is to teach the students about the importance of giving. This year, Young Heroes was suggested by Club President Zanele Dlamini. She said, “I’m very happy we have started working with Young Heroes to help other less privileged children. We hope that our successors will continue with the project in the coming years.”

On arrival at Nkwene, club members began working on a garden project. The vegetables grown will be shared with other families in the community through the local church. They also presented the Tsabedze family with clothes and then proceeded to the church where they played games, sang songs with the children and distributed fruit that had been donated by members of the club who couldn’t join in the trip.

One of Young Heroes’ strategies this year is to partner with other organizations so our children can receive services beyond food and clothing sponsorships. We’re  also developing ways of making monitoring more efficient through partnerships with NGOs and community-based organizations (CBOs).

 This has already led to a partnership with World Vision, which is helping to monitor our families in Lomahasha. We’re now in discussions with organizations such as COSPE in Siteki, to explore how a networking strategy could avoid duplication of services. Further, we participated in the Co-ordination Assembly of Non-Governmental Organizations’ workshop to promote networking to respond to HIV/AIDS crisis and in regional focus group discussions.

 This collaboration with CANGO and NGOs promises to yield fruitful results as it provides forums to network, develop partnerships and co-ordinate with other organizations. Through these partnerships, we intend to provide timely and effective response to the orphans we serve.

Doing good doesn’t have to be hard work – it can be fun, too.

Young Heroes Foundation has launched “100 Parties for the Orphans.” Our goal: to turn the Day of the African Child into a day of action on behalf of the children we serve by enlisting 100 people to hold house parties on or around June 16, 2009. Already, people from all over the U.S. have responded to the call. We even have one party pledged in Malawi!

For full information or to register your party, go to http://youngheroes.org.sz/dayofaction.asp, and help us spread the word by telling all your friends.

In Swaziland, it can be difficult to identify child-headed households because Swazi culture has a tradition of  assigning a relative to act as parent to orphans. Even if the children take care of their own cooking, washing and other household chores, an adult is assigned , if in name only, to provide moral and social – but not necessarily financial -- support.

Unfortunately, this practice is unable to provide a safety net for today’s orphans because families are overstretched by the large number of deaths. Also, some  relatives move to live with the orphans for reasons other than supporting them. The reality is that orphans often lose their property to relatives, or are exploited by them.

One Young Heroes family has three girls who live alone. The eldest, who is 15 years old, has maturely assumed the role of parent. A community - based organization provides them psychosocial support at least once every three months and the nearest church helps out, but these organizations are unable to feed and clothe the children. Having seen the desperate situation, relatives have made a plan to have two young unemployed male relatives move in. They fear that if the girls will grow up and marry, the family will not inherit the home.
 Whether this idea will work for the children remains to be seen. Young Heroes monitors  such situations closely. As we continue to seek support for such families, we will also continue to highlight issues such as this, and advocate that communities protect their  children and provide needed support.

The 2008 HIV sentinel sero-surveillance in women attending antenatal care services in Swaziland reveal very disturbing news indeed: HIV prevalence among pregnant women has again risen to 42%, an increase of 2.8% from 2006.

This is of much concern to Young Heroes, for it means that Swaziland will continue to have a large number of orphans in the years to come. Their number has already reached 117 000, and is escalating daily.

"Existing data clearly indicate continuity in new infections among the young population (15 - 24) with sharp increases noted between the ages of 19 and 23," the government report noted. "This shows that younger women, in particular, continue to be vulnerable to HIV infection.

We have hope that with the improved services to prevent mother-to-child transmission, newborns will be HIV negative. But in any case, we continue work hard to keep the orphans alive through the generous support of all our sponsors.

With the ever increasing number of orphans in Swaziland, it is so gratifying that local companies continue to partner with Young Heroes to meet the needs of the orphans in the country.

This time, companies in the art industry have donated a number of art pieces to Young Heroes. Most of these employ women and men in rural and impoverished areas, teaching them to use their skills to earn some income to take care of their families. The artwork will be auctioned in the USA through the Young Heroes Foundation. Besides the partnership in combating HIV and AIDS, this is a unique intervention considering participation from the very poor and the time the artisans have taken to produce these fine art pieces. One these is a hand-embroidered throw which have taken 32 hours to make by 4 artisans with the love and thought of the orphans each step they made. Indeed, this is “Art With a Heart”.

Young Heroes is pleased to announce that as of this month, the stipend amounts that we disburse to orphan families will increase. Food stipends will rise from E114 to E140 per child per month, while food and clothing stipends go from E174 to E210 per child per month.

There were two factors in this decision. The first is the rising cost of staples, most especially food. The monthly amount that we determined with the help of World Food Programme in 2006 at the inception of Young Heroes no longer has the buying power to meet the needs of the children we serve.

The second factor is the favorable exchange rate caused by the decline of the South African rand, to which the Swazi lilangeni is pegged, especially against the U.S. dollar. In light of this, we’re able to increase monthly stipends without asking our overseas sponsors to contribute more: Sponsorship remains $19.95 per month for food and $29.95 per month for food and clothing.

This week, Young Heroes had the pleasure of taking a sponsor from the U.S. to meet his family in KaZenzile, a small community at Kubuta in the Shiselweni region. Terry Anderson arranged to see the Ntjakala family through the Young Heroes community contact, Make Simelane. Terry is sponsoring two girls, Tengetile and Hloniphile, for food and clothing.

Local Member of Parliament Bheki Mkhonta, eagerly joined Young Heroes to witness our interventions in his area. Among the families visited was the Mabuzas, in which a grandmother of 70 years of age cares for a four-year-old boy. Gogo Mabuza shares a dilapidated house with him and two other children – a common occurrence in this community, which has an HIV prevelance of 81%. Because of that, almost all the families in Zenzile are caring for at least one orphan. The children travel about ten kilometers to attend school at Ebenezar Primary or Ekuphakameni High.

Young Heroes has enrolled five families in this community; they are all getting some sponsorship. However, more help is needed as some of the families are only sponsored partially.

Young Heroes has 16 families enrolled in Nhlalabantfu in the Shilselweni region. All the children have lost both parents and some of them are living in child-headed households. Seven families have obtained Young Heroes sponsorships to date.  

During a recent site visit, the most common problem that families expressed was the unavailability of money for school fees. They reported that they’ve registered for the government bursary for orphans, but did not get the assistance. Obviously, though government and NGOs have done considerable work in the education sector, but more help is still needed. Our Community Contact, Mr. Nhlabatsi, said it is a huge challenge because school fees are getting more expensive each year.  

Some of the children were forced to drop out of school last year during the third term as they were periodically sent home to collect school fees. Seeing that there was no money, they decided to stay home. In some parts of the country, those who sat for their final examinations did not receive their results because they owe the school. It is uncertain that they’ll be allowed back for this school year while still owing.  Still we hope for better this year, as people press for the government to make children from child-headed families a priority in the bursary program so that they can be empowered to break the poverty cycle.  

In the near future, Young Heroes will post news of a pilot education program that we are starting in three schools, so that we too can help to address this vital issue.