Today I
unfortunately have some very sad news for you and especially for us Cotlands
volunteers. For different reasons Cotlands had to undertake some changes in
their offers and is now closing the Baby Unit. The Baby Unit was the last residential
facility at Cotlands Gauteng after the closing of the facilities for older
children in the last few years. The sixteen babies that were living here are
now trying to be placed with adoptive families as soon as possible. Two of the
toddlers already left this week and some more adoptions are arranged. The
babies that can’t be placed fast enough will go to other children’s homes.
Originally it was planned to close the Baby Unit by end of April but for the
moment I think it even looks like everything would go quicker. For us that
means that many changes are going to come. Since New Year we were working in
the Baby Unit most of the days. Now that many babies are leaving there is
increasingly less to do for us and by the time that it is actually closing we
don’t know what tasks will be left for us. Our organisation will still go on
concentrating on their early learning facilities but that’s nothing where we
are usually helping or where we can even help a lot.
Cotlands
will also be moving to another building because the current one will be way too
big without the residential facilities. As far as I know a new building is not
found yet but there will surely be no place for us volunteers to live. For the
moment we are living in the Cotlands building so we also don’t know what will
happen to our living space. So in the next weeks we will have to face many
uncertainties – if we are unlucky we could even have to leave South Africa
earlier.
Luckily we are having our AFS midstay camp next
week. We are spending five days in the Drakensberg mountains with all of the
other German volunteers and some AFS staff members. Besides the fact that we
are already looking forward to see anyone again we will have a lot of time to
discuss the arisen problems of everyone and hope to find a solution for our
situation with the help of AFS. Until then we try to make the best out of it
even though it is very annoying not to know what will be happening here in the
next weeks and months.
