Tumelo Home | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Tumelo Home | Previous Challenge Entry
By Stanley McMahon
03/11/15
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There are three things essential to keep a person alive – blood, water and hope. Without blood the heart would stop, without water the body would dehydrate, and without hope the spirit would give up.

In a township forty miles north-west of Johannesburg, there is a care home for profoundly disabled children. It is the only brick structure for miles around in the middle of thousands of lean-to shacks that act as homes to the poor. In a place of shabby sanitation, where families struggle to eke out a living from gathering discarded plastic, Tumelo (Faith) Home stands as a beacon of hope.

In the early nineties, a baby was born to a family in this same township. Charlotte however, had not only to contend with the rigours of growing up in her tough surroundings, she had also been born physically and mentally disabled. She was immediately discarded by her family and left in a dumpster. Because her parents believed that a baby born in this way was a curse from their ancestors, they felt they had to get rid of Charlotte. Their animism had deprived her of hope, and a chance to live.

But someone was watching, and the observer knew that if this child was to survive, they needed help. They also knew that if anybody could save Charlotte, Doctor Moses could. Against all odds, they contacted the local doctor and told him about Charlotte’s plight. She was in very poor health and her chances of survival were slim. But she made it through. Charlotte was a fighter, and her survival sparked a vision in Doctor Moses; a vision to rescue children that had been discarded through poverty, belief or negligence and give them a home and a hope.

Today Tumelo Home is a purpose built care home that rivals any similar structure in the West and stands as a witness, not only to the determination of Doctor Moses to do something in the face of adversity; it is also a witness to the faithfulness and love of God and a monument to hope. Charlotte’s hopelessness was transformed by faith and hard work into a catalyst of hope for many others for years to come to be rescued from destitution and given hope for life. More than that, it is a statement of the Father’s abhorrence of evil on one hand and a demonstration of his boundless compassion on the other.

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