Sweetwaters

Sweetwaters is a South African community dying of AIDS. Currently 196 homes housing in excess of 500 children are parentless and without adult supervision. These orphaned children live in a culture being shredded by AIDS.

Love Is All We Need is a charity committed to diverting what will be a catastrophic outcome for children, communities, a country.

The Hope Centre is a haven that houses children affected and infected with AIDS and reaches out into the Sweetwaters community taking measures to care for these children.

Presently these children are being raped and robbed, living in homes ill equipped to meet their needs and struggling to survive. They are unable to attend school due to lack of funds for fees and uniforms putting their futures in jeopardy.

At present The Hope Centre has set up a mobile mother scheme where 8 local women between them visit 90 homes a day. They earn a box of food and the equivalent of £10 a month.

Sponsor-a-mother is a project being set up to fund the existing mobile mothers and 12 more in the next 2 months. The aim is for these mothers to be earning the equivalent of £70 a month which is a decent wage (for 1 year initially).

Other immediate projects that Love Is All We Need is taking on for this community include a campaign to have 500 children in school in January 2008 and to provide each home with a small, safe cooker.

Ultimately we are in the process of working towards building a village inside the community that we believe is a long term solution for restoring the foundations of hope, love and security in a devastated community.

— Jo Lawrence, Team London