A New Week ... A New Hope

My dear friends

One week on and we are still here. Praise God! Thank you to all who have contributed to help us through this terrible time!

I wanted to take this opportunity to explain how we have ended up in this terrible pickle. Many people have asked how it is possible the TLC has come to this point and I feel it necessary to bring some clarity to the matter.

The problem is exactly the reason so many other charities and homes have had to close their doors in the last year.

Firstly donations have become far less since the recession. 66% of TLC's donated income was from foreign donors - this always worked in our favour as all the currencies were stronger than the Rand. Over the last year many of our international donors have either reduced their contributions or stopped them altogether leaving us scrambling to pay our bills. Added to this the strong Rand and we find that many of the donations we do recieve no longer translate into the kind of amounts we used to depend on.


The corporate sponsors in SA are eager to sponsor specific projects, like our lovely chicken houses however they never want to cover your expenses like petrol, medicines, food and salaries - without which the work cannot continue! It is as if the economics of the world have conspired to drown us! The chicken houses for example ... are fantastic but empty for the simple reason that the price of steel skyrocketed after we received the donation to put in the unit, the consequence then was that the cost of the structures ate in to the budget for purchasing the chickens!

The second reason is linked then. The prices of everything have just been going up and up. Our food budget, which has always been one of our biggest expenses, just simply doesn't reflect the actual costs anymore. We used to get by with food costing us about R10 000 a week (which works out to just under R5 per person per meal) but now it costs us at least double that - and it is not that we are eating extravagant food! We still keep to the basics, we are still frugal and are still good at stretching meals for the masses and yet somehow we can no longer afford it.


This is just one example but there are many, like the price of fuel going up when the very nature of TLC requires a lot of driving around, the price of milk going up when children need it. All in all these things have driven TLC to its knees.


We are scrambling to find new ways and open new avenues for funding so that we don't ever lose this place. We are accessing the social media through our blogs,

Mommy's blog

Rhys' blog about TLC farm

The twin's blog

We are working hard to publish online my mother's previous book and she is going away to start writing the second one. We are writing to papers to see if we can get our profile more public and we are praying praying praying that somewhere somehow things will turn around for us.

Again. I am so grateful for the support people have offered and I just know that God will see us through this storm.

We love you all
Pippa