c. 2003 Religion News Service
POTCHEFSTROOM, SOUTH AFRICA _ The children and teenagers on stage moved in sync, smiled broadly, and enjoyed the applause of the appreciative audience. Dressed alike in black jeans, short-sleeved black tops, and red bandannas for the boys and red shawls wrapped around their waists for the girls, the troupe of 22 dancers exuded confidence and health.
Participants in Aardklop _ an annual arts and culture festival at Potchefstroom, a sleepy university town two hours from Johannesburg _ the dancers from Karos & Kambro joined hands, bowed professionally, and ran off the outdoor stage.
Looking at the performers, few would guess they live on the streets or in shelters _ and in poverty. Their lifeline is a nondenominational Christian arts program that is helping them reach for a higher standard of living.
Karos & Kambro, a nonprofit organization in poverty-striken South Africa, seeks to uplift some of the country’s most marginalized children through drama, music, poetry and dance. The program works life skills training into each activity.
Started in 2000 by Salome Combrink, Karos & Kambro has reached some 2,000 children in four of South Africa’s nine provinces.
“We’re a theater project, but we’re based on positive values. All of us are Christians, and we convey that to the kids,” said Combrink, 50. She holds a degree in drama from the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education and taught in its speech and drama department until 1997.
The group’s unusual name comes from two words in Khoi, South Africa’s most common indigenous language. “Karos” means blanket. “What we’re doing is bringing warmth and care to some of the most disadvantaged children in South Africa,” saids Combrink, the author of six books in Afrikaans.
Kambro, a succulent plant that survives the very harsh conditions of the veld, South Africa’s bush country, hides a delicious juice inside. “We are unearthing the hidden-away talent and potential of the children,” Combrink said.
The program’s positive, nurturing approach is a far cry from the violence and squalor of life on the streets. Most of the children have grown up exposed to alcohol, drugs and physical and sexual abuse. Some have been in jail.
Having been hardened by the underbelly of life, the youths come to Karos & Kambro with no value system, according to Combrink.
The director tells two stories of children she says are sadly typical of the Karos & Kambro children. Neil came to a shelter with no money in his pockets. He has no family; his mother died in May and his father left the family before Neil could remember him. Like many South African boys, he is behind in school and seemingly has no future.
A girl named Brenda ran away from home four years ago at age 10 and went to a shelter. “She wanted to kill herself because her mother gave her every 30 minutes to another man,” Combrink said.
International and national statistics substantiate the need for massive, positive intervention in the lives of South Africa’s children. A report by the United Nations Children’s Fund counts 300,000 maternal AIDS orphans in South Africa, a number expected to swell to 2 million by 2010. Over 10,000 children are homeless, and child abductions, assaults and rapes increased between 1996 and 2000, according to numbers from the South African Police Service.
Many of the children who become part of Karos & Kambro have lived in cardboard shelters, used cardboard for a bed mat, and covered themselves with cardboard for a blanket. Now, through arts programs, Karos & Kambro urges them to transform those experiences in reaching for a brighter future.
Recently, some of the children helped create “cardboard dreams, a journey of hope!,” a musical production written by Janice Honeyman. They performed the musical at Johannesburg’s prestigious civic center in front of Nelson Mandela, the former president. Some 200 street children appeared alongside such well-known international artists as P.J. Powers, a pop singer, and Desmond Dube, a comedian.
The idea _ a “vision” Combrink forthrightly calls it _ for a project specializing in the arts came slowly. It first came to her in the 1980s during a particularly troubled time in South Africa’s internal racial struggles between whites, blacks and Indians.
“I wondered how on earth we would be able to function in South Africa _ a land filled not only with so much poverty but also with so much violence,” Combrink said. “People were setting other people on fire. It was horrible,” she recalls.
Combrink realized that the young people who watched such violence carried scars. “I knew they must be so wounded because they were coming out of traumatic situations. I wondered how in the world we would ever be able to help so many children to be healed.”
Her idea took off, though the organization still struggles for funding. “The vision was taken out of my hands. When a vision is bigger than oneself, things happen. I must say, the Lord is very good,” she said.
DEA END BRANCH
