Granny gives E15m property to church

LWANDLE – Instead of selling her property and giving it to her children and grandchildren, a 93-year-old woman has given her church, the Methodist, an over 34-hectare farm as an offering.

The property is estimated to be valued at over E15 million and was given to the St Paul’s division of the church.
The farm is situated at Lwandle and has a boy’s home which houses 32 children, a water reservoir and a hammer mill, among other developments.
This church will also receive a three bed- room house situated next to St Michael’s High School. Others who will benefit is the Mahamba Methodist Church which will receive a girls home though th-ey will be obli-ged to look after the orph-ans who are currently housed in it.

All this was donated by Judith Sime-lane who is mother to former Dep-uty Prime Minister and Education Minister Constance Simelane, former Red Cross Director Thandi Dlamini and UNISWA Lecturer Dr Nomcebo Simelane.

She is a member of the Methodist Church which she deemed fit to carry on with the project she started in the early 1960s. Simelane had toyed around with the idea to sell the property but she, together with a committee that she set up, decid-ed agai-nst it.
However, the condition of the donation is that the beneficiary divisions of the Methodist Church will have to carry through the projects that she started, which is looking after the orphans currently occupying the two homes.

“I was a teacher by profession but I had to resign in 1964 upon realising that there were children out there who went to school in empty stomachs and without uniforms because they either had no parents or the remaining one could not afford to provide for them,” she said.
Simelane said she was so touched by the children’s plight that she abandoned teaching and started fending for the children.
“I approached some British women who were in another school and asked them how their children survived at school. They told me that they had a feeding scheme. I then informed them about the situation of some of the children in other schools and they offered to donate bags of samp and soup for the children,” she said.

She said she went around the communities and recruited two women per chiefdom, with whom they volunteered to take care and cook for the children and started contributing 25 cents per woman to provide for the children.
By then some of the women had already adopted one child each and were living with them at their homes. However, the number of needy and homeless children increased and there was a need to provide them with a home, hence the establishment of a girls’ home in 1968, which was a two-roomed stick and mud house built on a piece of land at Simelane’s marital home.

It started off with 10 girls whom they were providing with food, shelter and education by enrolling them in local schools and paying their school fees.
“As time went on we started having an increase in the number of boys, some who came at a very young age and needed the care of a ‘mother’,” she said.
That is how they started a boys’ home in Manzini where they were accommodated by a Nxumalo family for about seven years without paying anything for the shelter.
Simelane said it was in 1985 when they acquired a 34 hectare farm they bought for E45 000 from a South African man who was returning to his country.

The farm is located at Lwandle in the Manzini region.
Simelane said the decision to give the project over to the church was reached after a meeting with the recruited committee members. “We are now too old to run the project and most of us have since died. Since this is a social responsibility we felt the church could better handle it because it has a social responsibility as one of its mandates,” she said.

She said as they brainstormed on the idea of selling the properties they disregarded it. “We cannot trace all the relatives of our deceased colleagues to give them a share of the proceeds so selling was out of the way,” she said.
The elderly woman said they also wanted the mandate to look after needy children to be carried through.

Nurses, accountants among over 1 000 products of ka-Zondle

LWANDLE – Nurses, accountants and carpenters are among the over 1 000 products of ka- Zondle, the home for destitute children.

The homes for boys and girls are situated at Lwandle and Sibetsamoya respectively. Some of the children who were brought up there have become professionals in various fields. The women who had convened at the meeting at the boys’ home on Tuesday reiterated Judith Simelane’s words and assisted her in naming some of the beneficiaries.

Part of the members of the Ka-Zondle committee are America Robinson, Thini Dlamini, Deborah Vilane, Getrude Masuku, Constance Simelane, Mary Mndawe and Nomcebo Simelane.

They concurred that they did not only provide the children with education and shelter but also with life skills and a home environment. “They carry out the normal household chores that children do at home and they have the women caretakers who provide them with love and care like any other child would get at a normal home,” they said.

The women said the children were also hands on in gardening, ploughing and all other related duties. “We grow our own maize and vegetables and we also have a tractor and a mill where we grind the maize after harvesting. They are the ones who operate the mill. We also rear pigs and chickens for selling so that we raise money. The children are responsible for feeding the animals and cleaning their houses. They do this with the help of the men who were hired to assist at the farm,” said the women.

Simelane said since they were not a profit-making entity, they allowed members of the community to use the mill at a reasonable fee.

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