You cannot really call Herold a town, it is too small. One would rather call it a picturesque community hub serving the various farming communities in the beautiful Lang Kloof near George. Hidden within the amazing natural beauty of the area is the vulnerability of rural communities where poverty, isolation, lack of mobility and lack of opportunities often conspire to create difficult life circumstances and to limit people’s ability to live out their life potential. Women and children are particularly vulnerable.
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Our Herold Embrace group is a community project initiated and supported by the Dutch Reformed Church congregation in Herold with the assistance of the local clinic and Department of Health. We are a group of 8 “older” moms who are trying to find ways to support pregnant and new moms in the Herold community. Without the assistance of the clinic nurses who visit the farms, this project would not be possible at all. They have been incredibly helpful and supportive in many ways – ranging from identifying moms who might need support, motivating them to participate, liaising with us in terms of logistics for the mom’s transport, providing encouragement, to expert babysitting during our mom support day. At the moment we have 9 new moms who are participating. At first we tried to link up ‘mom-to-mom’ to develop one on one relationships, but we soon realized that because most of the moms live on farms, and because the numbers of new moms keep growing, regular mommy support days would work best. If long-term individual relationships develop as a result of these opportunities for interaction, we will celebrate it.
Pictures from our first mom Support Day: 20 August 2016
Six of our moms could attend our mommy support day on Saturday. They arrived a little tense, uncomfortable and painfully shy. We were expecting two of them to be pregnant, but they have since given birth, so the smallest baby was only 2 weeks old. The moms are all in their early 20s or younger. Our themes for the morning were “you are not alone” and early brain stimulation. We wanted to combine these two focus points by together making a colourful mobile for each baby.
Our “older” mom group made colourful pompoms and prepared everything beforehand so that we could do the fun assembly side of things on the day.
While working on the mobiles we had shy and somewhat strained conversations as a group, and in pairs. We spoke about things that matter to us, some of the ups and downs of motherhood and so forth. Slowly, slowly we started to make a little headway in the process of establishing ties – we still have a way to go, but herein lies the heart of our effort and our most significant hope to contribute to the lives of these children and their mothers.
We also wanted to be helpful in a practical way, so we shared information and ideas around how we can stimulate babies, especially their language development. We memorized and tried out little action songs and rhymes on the babies and explored strategies to converse with them - they were a lot less shy and sometimes delightfully vocal :-).
All and all we feel satisfied with how the day turned out - driving the moms back afterwards, the atmosphere was already more spontaneous and relaxed. We are planning another support day for the first week of October (2016).