A few weeks ago, I found myself in the middle of a grade R (the South African version of kindergarten) classroom in downtown Joburg, watching kids have fun with paper, glue, paint, and glitter. The kids were assembling and decorating big paper flowers for the nearby Joziburg Lane market at One Eloff Street. The flowers would be used to decorate Joziburg Lane for its opening festival during the last week of May.
After the madness of the all the flower creation was dying down, I took two Instax pictures of each kid with his/her flower. One picture went home with the child and the other one went to One Eloff.
A couple of weeks later, just before the Joziburg Lane Festival, I met the kids at One Eloff to photograph them decorating the Lane.
Fortunately it doesn’t rain or get very windy at this time of the year, so the wall still looked great when the Joziburg Lane Festival started a couple of days later.
This was a fun project, and I’ll be writing more about One Eloff and Joziburg Lane in the future.
While watching the kids decorate the flowers at the Grow Up and Learn School I had a chat with Girlie Khoza, the grade R teacher at the school. This non-profit school is located in one of Joburg’s tougher neighborhoods, receives little to no public funding, and has very few resources. The kids have no outdoor space to play, the school is short of supplies (the kids were wearing makeshift garbage bags as smocks while they painted), and the kitchen facilities need upgrading.
The guys from Molten Black, who oversee the One Eloff project, have agreed to marshall some resources – construction materials, volunteer time, etc. – to help the Grow Up and Learn School. And I agreed to ask my readers to donate to the school. Molten Black will collect the donations in a special account and then give the money to the school.
If you’d like to make a donation, please use the following account details:
Account name: Buffshelfco 7 Pty Ltd
Bank: Standard Bank Account number: 001 734 970 Branch: Balfour Park Branch No: 009 160
Please type in “Grow Up and Learn” as your reference for this donation.
The school doesn’t have its own website or a donation tool, so for now the donations will be limited to South Africans who can give via an EFT. But if I receive a lot of interest, perhaps we can set up something more formalized. Let’s see what happens.
If you want to check out Joziburg Lane for yourself (I’m sure the flowers are still up), follow them on Facebook for their upcoming events.
How have I never blogged about 44 Stanley Avenue, the coolest shopping and dining complex in Joburg, which is only five minutes from my house?
I guess it’s wrong to say I’ve never blogged about 44 Stanley; I’ve mentioned it countless times over the years (see here and here) when writing about specific restaurants or shops that are there. But I’ve never written a dedicated post about 44 Stanley as a destination and it’s about time I did – especially now, with the holidays upon us.
I’ve been dreadfully uninspired lately, struggling to think of anything I want to blog about despite having a long list of great ideas (many of which you, my readers, provided in September). I’m finding it hard to feel positive about life at the moment. But on Saturday Thorsten and I got the chance to visit Indwe Park, an indigenous garden and sculpture park in Braamfontein, and I knew I had my topic for today.
Given this week’s political nuclear bomb blast, it feels like a weird time to publish a light-hearted post about my recent (pre-election) jaunt through the United States. But I’m hoping you’ve have had enough of the U.S. election horror show – I know I have – and are ready (at least temporarily) for some wholesome American travel adventures. If so, please read on about my four-day visit to Maine, the northeastern-most state in the lower 48, with my sister, Susanna.
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It makes me smile, when I see it.