RAPHAEL CENTRE

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Contents

 
ABOUT THE RAPHAEL CENTRE
 
The Raphael Centre was founded in 1999 as a community-based organisation. Initially the Centre provided only support services for a small number of people living with HIV/AIDS. Since February 2002, it has run the first free HIV Testing and Counselling (VCT) service in Grahamstown, and has refocused its services around the provision of VCT.
Anyone concerned to know their HIV status can visit the Raphael Centre where a nurse qualified to administer testing is available. Alongside testing, the Centre also runs an education and support programme to help those who have AIDS. Nutrition, Home-Based Care, Food Gardening and Sexual Hygeine are included in the programme, as are courses on HIV coping skills.

The Raphael Centre is at 11 Donkin St, Grahamstown. It is a rambling building set in tranquill grounds, with meeting areas, food serving area, garden space with vegetable patches and a playground build by student volunteers.

Soweto Connection has been providing funding to the Raphael Centre since early in 2004. A lot of the funding has been used in the Centre's home gardening program, which is aimed as providing nutrition for it's clients and their families

March 2006 - Voluntary counselling and testing to go mobile


The Raphael Centre is about to start a program to take voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) to the outlying rural areas, by implementing the first mobile VCT service in the province. The basic modus operandi is to travel to a community, and establish an Aids support group. Only when this is up and running will they start a mobile testing service, so that people who are found to be HIV positive have support. The mobile service will include a nurse, counsellors and test kits .

To do this they need to raise enough funds to buy a vehicle capable of coping with bad roads (and sometimes no roads) in the deep rural areas. For now they are using their mini-bus and visiting only communities located on passable roads.

The new mobile VCT service is to be called Nikithemba, which means “giving hope” in Xhosa. Please support Nikithemba by giving what you can, or by organising an event to raise funds.

The only vehicle currently available to the Raphael Centre, a Toyota Condor, is unsuitable for access to many of the rural communities that the VCT service is needed in.

 
 

January 2005


"Thank you so very much for the donation to the Raphael Centre! It came at just the right time. School has started. Yesterday Simphiwe and  I went to pay the school fees for 40 of the orphans and affected children supported by the Centre. This is not the total number of children we will help to stay in school this year. More will start trickling in. Simphiwe has come up with a list of more people who will be making fences under his tutelage. The plan is to fence another four vegetable gardens in the next few months. ... We are very busy this year with more new clients than we had expected. This year we have launched more programs. The one I am most excited about is an intensive education and monitoring program for pregnant women who are HIV+ and their infants geared at prevention of HIV infection of babies by their mothers. Thank you again for your continued support." Email from Annelie van Niekerk, Director of the Raphael Centre. January 2005

September 2004 - Gardening Project Gets Under Way

In September 2004, Annalie van Niekerk, manager of the Raphael Centre wrote:

... thank you so very much for these donations. The money from Soweto Connection is being used to provide fencing for vegetable gardens. Any money not used for fencing will be used to maintain orphans and affected children in school and to provide food parcels to persons living with HIV/AIDS if they have no source of income.

The making and erection of fences,  which is part of the Raphael Centre's home gardening program, began in July 2004. Here are some photographs taken of the first fence being made and erected at a Raphael Centre client's home. The work was done by a team of Raphael Centre clients and volunteers, along with volunteers from Soweto Connection.

Planting the Garden

Nondhundla and her daughter plant spinach and cabbage in a patch of ground beside their house in the Joza Township (Grahamstown).

Making the Fence

Raphael Centre clients and a Soweto Connection volunteer making the wire fence that will protect the vegetables in Nondhundla's garden from animals and other threats. The work was done at an Umthathi Training Project facility in Grahamstown.

Erecting the Fence

Here we see some of the work to put up the fence around Nondhundla's garden ...

After the Work is Done ...

People stop on the street outside Nondhundla's house to look at the new garden.

Simphiwe Mgobo, a Counsellor with the Raphael Centre, discusses the fence making at the Umthathi Training Project facility in Joza with John of Soweto Connection .