March News

The Adventurers

Last week we were very excited to receive our long-awaited new generator. This generator was bought with the funds that were raised from the Cycle To The Sea biking challenge that took place last year and we are extremely thankful to all the people who took part! A generator means that we will never be without electricity and enables us to continue our high level of care for our patients regardless of what it going on with the grid. Quite recently we’ve had a number of power cuts so this is going to come in very handy.

Our in-patients have also been treated to a visit from the ‘Adventurers’ youth group who came to sing for them as well as visits from German volunteer, Gundi, who is staying at Village of Hope but comes to do craft with the in-patients every Wednesday.

Next week, on 24th March we will be joining forces with the local clinic to screen the community for TB on World TB day. Grabouw has the highest rate of TB deaths in its municipality and it’s a curable disease, so this is a very important virus for us to tackle.

November News

Who can believe that another year has come to the end? With lots of challenges for the year especially the IPU: We had 61 new admissions for the year this is except for those how had been re-admitted into the IPU and 13 deaths. The sad part is 2 of the ladies who died were on our books the longest - but no amount of education/love/care could stop the illness. There are so many out there that needs our love and care and our Home-based Care ladies have a great task to see to them and their needs.

To the many volunteers that visited our project and went on rounds with our Home Based Care ladies this year we want to thank each and every one. We pray that you will take with you the knowledge and empower others around the world with what you have experience and fist hand seen.

ThembaCare also put on a fresh coat of paint in the interior and we look really smart for the festive season.

To our loyal staff we wish you and your families a wonderful Christmas and that the new year will be full of blessings.

October News

The inpatient unit continues to ebb and flow with patients. Earlier this month we had only three patients, now we are full again including caring for a mother of a former Village of Hope child. She is in a very bad way with what has been diagnosed as cancer and we are doing our best to make her as comfortable as possible. We sadly lost one of our patients early this month.

The outpatient carers are still on their normal routine in the community providing hope through caring for those in need, with day-to-day challenges. We also have had some volunteers who dedicated their time to assist in the community by accompanying the carers on their rounds.

The HIV counseling and testing team goes out at least 6 times in a month to the local businesses and farms to test the staff. Huge thanks goes to the driver, Johan, from Village of Hope, who compromises everything to make sure the two counsellors arrive to the farms and businesses safely.

Our staff enjoyed themselves at the year-end staff party, which was held at KwaMzoli’s in Gugulethu Cape Town. This is a township restaurant famouse for its braai (BBQ). Some staff also receives certificates for hard working and for going that extra mile and it’s great that they are recognised for this.

September News

This month we were honoured to have two teams of cyclists in two countries completing Thembaltisha’s Cycle To The Sea bike challenge in order to raise funds for a back-up power generator for our project. On Friday 13 September a team of Thembalitsha staff and volunteers set off from our facility and cycled 200km over three days to get to Cape Aguhlas (the most southern point in Africa). Most of the team were not experienced cyclists and this was a big challenge for them in nasty weather but the teams spirits were high and they achieved their goal with smiles on their faces. 

At the same time a team of eight cyclists in the UK also completed a Cycle To The Sea challenge. The cycled 100 miles in a day from Henley to Brighton! We would like to thank both teams for this extraordinary effort on our behalf. We are still waiting to find out the total amount raised but even if we don’t have enough money to get the generator now we are a lot closer to getting it now than we were a couple of weeks ago!

August News

Life at a hospice is always a rollercoaster of highs and lows. It is to be expected that, being involved in this kind of service, we will experience patients die. However the experience never becomes easier to handle and this month we lost four inpatients in the space of just one week! We can take comfort in the fact that we provided each one with love and care in their last days but sometimes it is hard not to be sad.

We have happily been able to make some improvements to our building thanks to a local funder and now have some neat and tidy new flooring throughout the unit as well as a wonderful container outside for file archiving. In the near future we will also be adding a sluice room and more storage in order to meet the standard required by HPCA (Hospice Palliative Care Association) for a 3-star award. It is good to see our premises improving and becoming more professional.

All our carers got some added sparkle on Women’s Day by having some refreshing juice given to us by Appletiser which was wonderful.

Please keep our Sister Portia in your prayers as she is in recovery from an operation and remember those in the community who are suffering with all the cape storms we have been experiencing this winter. Many trees have fallen squashing house and lots of homes have been flooded.

July News

Pineview students washing cars for Mandela Day

This month here in South Africa we are encouraged to mark Mandela Day by giving back 67 minutes to our community. Of course, here at ThembaCare we give back to the community anyway but we were very touched by some other local organisations who decided to help us out with their 67 minutes of service. Pineview school came to wash cars and tidy the garden, Groenberg school donated a lovely quilt and R1007! The local rugby club came and made us lunch and helped to feed our patients and the Moravian church came to pray with our patients for 67 minutes. It is days like Mandela day when we really realise the power of the community and the potential we have to make a difference by working together for good. Thank you so much to everyone who came to bless us. It made a huge difference to us!

HCT team make local farm visits....

our HCT team at auldearn farm last week

as you may be aware thembacare grabouw offers three services to our community, firstly we have a seven bed inpatient unit which provides the only overnight care beds for a town of around 60,000 people many who are in desperate need of end of life hospice care. secondly our outpatient team care for over 450 people who are living with HIV and or TB in our local community, their daily/weekly visits ensure that people continue with their TB, or understand their HIV, medication to enable them to live a long and productive life and thirdly we have our very own testing and counselling service which enables people to test for HIV, TB, high blood pressure and sugars etc.

we have recently been looking at how we can make the third arm, our HCT (HIV counselling and testing) more effective. we have a converted caravan, which is fully equipped to provide a mobile service, and this is often seen in the community at public open spaces and schools to allow people to come have a chat and maybe even find out their status for those various areas but we really wanted to enable more people to test, so what better place to do that than at the work place.

over the last month we have visited some of the staff at the huge fruit packing sheds which surround the town and last week we made visits to a couple of farms who's managers were keen to help their staff understand more about living with HIV. for us it's so important that people know their status, once this is known then we can help them to start addressing areas of their lives that need to change and also seek professional medical advice if they do find that they have a bigger medical need.

if you would like to find out more about this service then do call our thembacare grabouw office and they will be able to set up a date for us to either bring the caravan to your farm or make a visit to your facility, please note that we are sorry but this is currently limited to the grabouw and elgin region, we aren't able to offer this amazing service nationally or even internationally as yet!