Lesotho - October 2008 Last year we donated, through the members generous support over R15 000 to the orphanage at Semokong and this year I was invited to travel with the team from Urban Edge Church to Semokong to see what we had funded and to personally help. The orphanage currently looks after 83 orphans and these are kids from 6 months old to 16 years old. To qualify the children must have lost both parents and they are them placed in the orphanage where they are looked after. Schools are plentiful and the orphans are placed in one of the local schools where they get taught the basics with one school housing for example 100 kids from 5 years old to 18 years old so lessons are very diverse. Our donation was used to paint buildings, fence the orphanage (not complete yet), fix buildings, buy the basic necessities for the orphans and shepards. OK, what was it like? Initially very much out of the Western comfort zone! Every morning we took drums to the river and pumped water into the drums for showering for toilets, etc. The river is low so the power generation system only works now and again and so on a good day you may get 80 litres of drinking water from the borehole and on other days, maybe 10 litres. The people are very friendly and although very few speak English we managed to communicate. I was assigned a few tasks, these being mostly 4x4 work, taking teams of teachers into remote villages to assist with teacher training and run a holiday club for kids. The villages were pointed out and then you have to get there, crossing rivers, riding over mountains, some very scary mountain passes and then basically building your own roads. A further task was to get a group of six people into the mountains to a remote village and help complete the schools foundations. A fourteen kilometer drive took about 5 hours with some very hairy side slopes (with my roof rack packed with stuff for the kids and village'rs). We lived at the village for three days and managed to complete the foundations, ran a clinic, ran a holiday club for the kids and assisted the local teachers. All in all it was an amazing experience and I will definitely go again.