Schoemansdal community

After 17 hours of plane we reached Jo’Burg in South Africa. We stayed only one night in the economic capital. Just enough to tell that the people from this country are very nice. We met Sylvain and Loraine of the French TV who are going to make a documentary on our charity work.

The day after, we took the bus to Nelspruit and met jade & John, our 2 contacts here. It’s been one year that we are in contact and it was a great pleasure to meet them, finally. They helped us a lot in our mission here. Nothing would have been possible without them and their help.

Jade & John took us to Joshua, the children’s coach. He is doing that for free, just to help the children to do sports.

It was a great joy to be here in this community with Jade, Joshua and the boys. They all keep coming to training after school, even though they run without shoes and don’t have a track…Some of them are walking about 4 kilometres to come to training. They are all smiling and very devoted to what they do. They never complain about their situation. Those kids are admirable.

Then Delphine asked them all for their shoe size, but they didn’t really get why we were asking that.

On the following day, we went to the nearest city, driven by John on his Land Rover, in order to buy running equipment to the kids. Shoes, socks, water bottle and shorts. During the afternoon session we organised the session for the kids. They really loved it as we tried to do some games to make athletics funnier. Unfortunately, we had to postpone the shoes distribution because of the journalists. They didn’t have enough light to film the documentary. We were sad not to see their reaction.

During our last day in the community we went to the bank with Jade to open a bank account and we found a name for the club. And now thanks to Jade the club has a name and a bank account. Now we could help them pay the entry form for the competition and the transport. At the end of the day we went to the training and we distributed the equipment to the kids! Delphine couldn’t be here because she was really sick. It was a great moment to see them happy with their new shoes. It was just very unlucky for Delphine…

It was very difficult to say good bye to everybody. We will come back, for sure!