2025 - July Newsletter
As we share updates this month, remember you are not just funding programs. You’re igniting a quiet revolution of respect.
Dear Friends, Supporters, and Changemakers,
As the winter sun warms our hearts, we welcome you to this month’s edition with gratitude deeper than the roots of the marula tree. To you our donors, volunteers, and allies, we say, Re a leboga (Setswana for “Thank You”). Thank you for standing with Botshibelo Community Development Trust as we navigate the storms of poverty that burden our communities.
Our little village
This month, we’re reminded that hope often wears a quiet face.
Never underestimate the power of ‘seeing’ someone. This month, share a smile with a stranger, you might be their first in weeks.
In the rush to address systemic crises, we’ve learned something profound - the smallest acts of humanity can unravel the heaviest chains. A grandmother at BCDT told us, “When your eyes see ME, not my poverty, I remember I’m still alive.” A young father shared how a single conversation, “just someone listening, not judging, gave him courage to seek work after years of shame.
BCDT’s work isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about the kind word that says, “You matter.” The moment of dignity when a teen is called by their name, not “useless lazy drug addict.” The hand up that asks for nothing in return, no forms, no debts, no hidden costs. Why does this matter? Because trauma isolates. Poverty dehumanizes. But you our supporters fuel a different story. Every meal shared, every ear that listens, every “hello” to the woman others cross the road to avoid, these are the threads weaving a net of community.
Health is on the line
We are told to be patriotic, to have faith in democratic institutions, but what does loyalty mean when basic human needs are not met? In BCDT, Magaliesburg and the surrounding areas, people are getting sicker, thinner, more hopeless. The health clinic is overcrowded, understaffed, and under-resourced. Chronic illnesses like diabetes, AIDS, and hypertension, conditions that need consistent management, are simply not being treated properly, resulting in patients not returning. Everyone is holding their breath to see the fallout from Trump’s cancelling of certain HIV/AIDs programs. The lack of access to proper health care becomes a slow death sentence. One hears things like “Going to a government hospital is like saying goodbye.”
Hunger
Hunger remains one of the most visible and painful signs of inequality in our country. No matter how many debates or promises are made, the truth is plain to see—just look around. In many poor communities, children and adults alike are painfully thin, their bodies showing the harsh reality of daily hunger. Meanwhile, in wealthier areas, people appear well-fed, healthy, and thriving. The physical evidence in our communities shows things are not getting better.
Education
Education suffers a similar fate. The future of the school is uncertain. Our school subsidy, critical for keeping the school going, buying supplies, and paying support staff, has failed to arrive. Not in March, not in April, and now it's July. Even though it is gazetted that the subsidy should be paid out by the 19th of April. Attempts at follow up get shrugged off. “I’m in the financial department and I don’t know either,” we’re told. How can an entire generation of children be raised in an environment where the very institutions meant to support them are absent or evasive?
Corruption charges fly around in the news like background noise. Investigations go nowhere. Communities like ours are treated like collateral damage. Meanwhile, we watch well-connected officials thrive. Politicians promise, but on the ground, all we feel is abandonment and hopelessness as corruption eats at everything that is vital to human well being. What does hope look like when the system is broken, and nobody is fixing it?
Containers of Hope: Building Futures, One Container at a Time
In the heart of our village, where resilience meets vision, the Containers of Hope project is beginning to rise not just as a set of shipping containers, but as a living, breathing village of opportunity.
Thanks to the generosity of sponsors and the tireless commitment of the BCDT, we hope to soon make these containers into dynamic hubs of training, healing, storytelling, and survival. Each container will house a different life-changing skillset, aimed at uplifting our youth, elders, and community.
At Botshabelo, our Containers of Hope will not just be spaces for teaching traditional skills, they will be platforms for joining the technological revolution. While we continue to value crafts like cobbling, we’re now integrating advanced tools such as digital design software and 3D printing to take these skills to the next level. Instead of stopping at hand-stitched shoes, our participants are learning to design and produce shoe soles, components, and custom fittings using affordable, cutting-edge technology.
This marks a major shift, from survival-based projects like candle-making to innovation-driven training that prepares our community for meaningful participation in the modern economy. We’re not just making shoes; we’re building sustainable futures.
Our goal is to produce what is genuinely needed in our communities. For example, affordable and durable shoes and soccer boots for children in poorer areas, where the only available options often fall apart after a few games. The global rise of artificial intelligence and tech manufacturing has dramatically reduced the cost of equipment, making it feasible, even for NGOs, to access machines that can produce high-demand, high-need items right where they are most needed.
This model is catching on around the world, with communities using low-cost tech solutions to meet local needs, create jobs, and build dignity through enterprise. At Botshabelo, we’re proud to be part of that global shift, turning hope into action and technology into opportunity.
What’s Inside the Containers?
Vocational Training Units
Containers will be fitted for plumbing, hair dressing, electrical technology (including appliance repair), and computer literacy. These will be hands-on workshops designed to equip our youth and unemployed adults with practical, marketable skills in high-demand sectors.
Making our first ‘Rocket Stove’ for the village. Uses very little wood & cooks fast!
Literacy and Business Education
Another cluster will host literacy classes, entrepreneurship, information technology and social media, bookkeeping, and small business training, empowering participants not only to work, but to own and operate enterprises within and beyond the village.
The Heritage Museum & Art Gallery
A deeply meaningful addition, this dual container will house the lived histories of Black South African farm workers - women, men, and children who endured life under apartheid. Through oral histories, displays, and visual art, this space will become a beacon of memory and healing for our village and the nation.
A Youth function Every cent counts & is appreciated
Cobbler & Repair Container
Shoemaking and leather repair are traditional skills with new relevance, especially in rural economies. Here, young people will learn to mend and make, saving money while preserving craftsmanship.
Hospitality Training & Roadside Café
Guateng is surrounded by tourist hotels and lodges. Our youth need training and experience to access these jobs. Some have already completed hospitality courses, others will soon train and work in a container-based hospitality unit. An adjacent roadside container will serve as a village café and shop, managed by trainees.
Investing in Our Youth
The students who join the Containers of Hope programmes often come from extreme poverty. Many rely on hard labour for daily meals. That’s why BCDT is not only seeking support to renovate and equip the containers, but also to provide stipends to each student, ensuring they can eat, study, and grow without hunger holding them back.
Why Gauteng? Why Now?
Gauteng is a vital hub of domestic and international tourism. With destinations like Johannesburg, Pretoria, the Cradle of Humankind, and the Magaliesberg nearby, our region receives thousands of visitors, but many of our rural youth are excluded from this booming industry due to lack of marketable skills and experience.
The Container of Hope will close that gap. It will turn forgotten spaces into job-creating places, directly connecting young people to tourism, service, cultural heritage, and skilled trades. It’s not just about jobs, it's about dignity, purpose, and a future.
How You Can Help
BCDT invites donors, partners, and community members to help us:
Fund and fit out the containers
Sponsor learner stipends
Donate tools, appliances, training material, or hospitality equipment
Share stories and volunteer your expertise
Together, we are growing a village of hope, one container at a time.
Literacy as Liberation: A Letter, a Name, a lineage – personal stories of villagers
What price can we place on the ability to read and write your own name?
At Botshibelo, our Container of Hope includes a powerful and tender literacy program, where our youngest learners are just four; our oldest, well into their eighties. They arrive quietly, with one simple, heart-breaking request: “Please teach me to write my name.”
Gadifele Diale and her husband, Grandfather Petrus
First reading and writing lesson
Petrus correctly predicted he would write the letter A before his wife. He was very proud.
Young readers
"No history book can truly convey the pain of having your education stolen."
During one of our literacy sessions, Mme Redialatso Khoza quietly shared her story. She had been taken out of school in Grade 1 to care for her sick grandparents. She never returned. Now a pensioner, she has lived her entire life unable to read or write, a direct result of apartheid. As a child, she walked to a faraway river with a 20-liter container balanced on her head, rather than walking to school. She never returned to school, and never held a pen again, until she began the Containers of Hope literacy program.
Her words carried decades of silent loss. As she spoke, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. We had to pause the session, overcome by the depth of emotion. It was a stark reminder: education is not just a right, it is dignity, it is power, and it is a door that should never be closed on anyone.
This is not one woman’s story. It is the story of millions, an apartheid legacy that deliberately destroyed generations of Black South Africans' education, dignity, and dreams. In rural communities like ours in Gauteng, many elders were denied schooling to serve as child labourers on white-owned farms or caretakers in households broken by migrant labour systems. Their lineages, languages, and histories were silenced, their names often erased from paper and from memory.
That is why our literacy container is more than reading and writing, it is an act of restoration and resistance. We are documenting these untold life stories through a Heritage File Project, pairing each learner’s progress with a collection of personal memories. These files will be gifted to families, preserving their legacies, stories of survival, endurance, and unbreakable love, before they are lost forever.
If these stories are not recorded now, they may die with our elders. And if our children do not hear them, they may never understand what was stolen, or what must never be stolen again.
From stolen education to reclaimed dreams — this is what justice looks like.
Thank you for standing with us as we turn containers into classrooms, pain into purpose, and forgotten people into empowered leaders.
Let’s keep building a South Africa where no one is left behind.
Contact details: Angel-Strong.org