ACTS Volunteers Cape Town
Overview
ACTS Volunteers partner with Living Hope, which started in 1999 and focuses on the prevention, care and treatment of HIV and AIDS patients. They offer Palliative Care and Prevention Ministries to patients and members of the community in Masiphumelele, Ocean View, Red Hill, Muizenberg, and Capricorn. Their focus is on Jesus, and the passage from Matthew, “As much as you do for one of the least of these, you do for Me.”
Living Hope grew out of King of Kings Baptist Church.
Volunteers will work alongside career missionaries and Christian health professionals at Living Hope. Together with ACTS, they create a volunteer site that is about as diverse you can get; you name it, it’s possible. If you have the talent, Cape Town project can use it. And if you don’t know what area of ministry your place is, we’ll figure out exactly where you’re meant to be.
Kids Clubs:
Get involved in facilitating the kids clubs on all levels. Play with & love the kids, help with control and discipline, supervise activities, help plan the daily activities & writing the curriculum. Help & encourage the Life Skills Educators
Teen Clubs:
A specific curriculum where you talk to the kids about teen issues from the atypical issues of insecurities that teens face, the importance of education, life skills and instilling a foundation to be inspiring young adults to approaching the deep issues of South African teens such as HIV/AIDS, sex, rape, prostitution, multiple partners, physical abuse, intensely broken and messed up home lives, drugs and alcoholism. The volunteers get to help the Life Skills Educators in the same way as the Kids Clubs.
Vacation Bible School:
This takes intensive planning. Volunteers who are here before the VBS play a crucial role in planning the VBS from theme, to activities, to preparing the materials and then being a key role in the running of it. VBS takes place during the school holidays which are generally around April, end June/July and end Sept/Oct and beginning of Dec. Living Hope and the ACTS project are closed over Christmas.
Living Grace:
A homeless shelter where people who live on the streets can come and get a home cooked meal and receive spiritual food for the soul too. Volunteers have gotten involved by developing and growing the standard of the morning and mid day worship and devotions. They have brought along a guitar and a couple of new songs and taught the homeless chorus’ and actions and have them dancing and clapping with great vigour. They assist the staff hugely by helping them sort food, clothing, helping them cook, dish up meals, clean and generally give joy to the Homeless Shelter by their abundant energy and enthusiasm.
CCFM/Mobile Music Academy:
This is a new initiative which is finding underprivileged children of the area who have undiscovered natural gifting in singing/music. They currently have 5 students and have already recorded their first song and been interviewed on live radio.
Those volunteers who are gifted musically are used in teaching the kids how to read music, voice training, music history and they teach them musical instruments. They also get involved with the marketing and developing, sponsorship, networking, the curriculum and helping gather resources for the Mobile Music Academy.
Living Hope Community Centre (Headquarters)
This is essentially a hospice for people with HIV/AIDS that has now actually changed its name to “Health Care Centre” because initially it was a place for people to have a comfortable end to their life but due to LH’s holistic ministry in teaching patients about HIV/AIDS, nutrition, ARV’s, and God that has now changed to 85% of the patients actually return home. Volunteers come to befriend the patients, talk to them, entertain them, read and laugh. They also end up becoming vital to the staff by helping feed the patients, change bedding, help in the laundry and in the kitchen and again with the general morale of the place. Volunteers with more medical background may be more involved here as assistants to the nurses and staff as well as in the clinics and home based care.
Manual Labour/Community Work:
Part of the project is getting involved in the community at large and volunteers often get recruited to be involved in a manual project such as building shelters at the kids clubs, clearing rocks for play areas, pulling weeds, painting etc.
Office work:
Helping with the administration of Living Hope makes life so much easier for the Living Hope Staff enabling them to spend more time focusing on the work or project that they’re busy with at the time. The office work varies from data input, to filing and to sorting ribbon. Volunteers have even gotten involved with extensive surveys where they’ve gone into every single house in a community finding out specific information required for Living Hope to be able to grow effectively in that area.
Wait for Me Campaign:
Is an annual campaign run by an international team partnering with the local Life Skills Educators, this campaign teaches school kids about abstinence and the message of Jesus’ love for them. There is a huge amount of organising and paper work required for this to even happen and the volunteers form a crucial part of this. Again it’s dependent on when the volunteer arrives with relation to the launch of the event. When the event itself takes place volunteers help with crowd control, back stage, lighting, music, feeding the kids etc.
Living Way:
Volunteers get involved with all aspects of developing this new branch of Living Hope. Living Way works to economically empower people from under-resourced communities in the Cape Peninsula. It develops entrepreneurs and empowers individuals by teaching them the skills to run a business, save for the future and connects them with job opportunities as well as creating jobs by growing businesses.
Some additional involvements that our volunteers have been part of:
Filming of a professional promotional DVD that is used to raise funds for Living Hope.
Teaching Life Skills Educators who aren’t qualified or trained teachers the skills and ‘tricks’ of effective class management and discipline and developing an environment of trust and respect and a captured and co-operative class.
During the xenophobic violence and the Internally Displaced People (aka refugees) our volunteers went every day to bring joy and happiness to the kids who have had their lives turned upside down. The volunteers brought activities, songs, crayons and balls and spent many hours with the kids, getting to know them and having fun with them. This served as a great subtle ministry in the muslim camp and not only that but helped the refugee adults and parents by taking the kids out of the tent and entertaining them. The adults also enjoyed the times they had an ear willing to listen to them talk about home, life, family etc.
Outside of Ministry
The volunteers plan their own evening and weekend activities but what we do get involved with is a daily morning devotion and prayer time where we go through a chosen book of the bible and each person leads a morning. And once a week we have volunteer bible study lead by a senior company staff member but people who cross paths with the volunteers in some way or another are invited as a guest speaker on the occasional week. On Sundays they attend King of Kings and every other Sunday they go to a more traditional African service in one of the townships they work in.
In terms of activities the volunteers fill their time with. They have done everything from the extremes of Shark Cage Diving, Sky Diving, to hiking Table Mountain, Wine Tasting, sight seeing to Cape Point, penguins at Boulders Beach. They have frequented the V&A Waterfront, made visits to neighbouring towns such as Stellenbosch, Hermanus, visited Robben Island – and the prison cell of Nelson Mandela, even done the tranquil sunset walks where you can see whales and seals playing in the water.
They have also been invited to attend functions as well as being invited to stay over or go for lunch at friends houses in the townships. On weekends the volunteers also help out with general activities that Living Hope and the Life Skills Educators hold.
Extra:
Seeing the volunteers become a well used and respected source of help is amazing. The Living Hope staff and Life Skills Educators have welcomed them with open arms and have found much joy in the friendships developed. It is beautiful to see the bonds being built.
Many of the on the ground staff have commented how much their lives have been touched by various ACTS Volunteers in various ways and I know for sure this is the same for the volunteers. They walk away with changed hearts.
