Toys for Africa

It is time for our second Toy Drive of 2012, which will be to the Drakensberg, one of the poorest areas in our country. Because it is so far from all the major cities, it is often neglected. We will be visiting a lot of farm schools and orphanages. Our main stops will be in Bergville, Winterton, Estcourt, Mooi River and Underberg. Our inspiration is also from Thunzi Primary and all the hard work we see Terri Russell puts in. She is truly inspirational and allows us to again keep our thinking framework within the forgood family. As with everything, we are sponsorship bound, and since our sponsors want to be a part of the drive, we will accommodate our timing to fit in with them. We are looking at October or November to hand out around 1 500 toys.

We learnt some important lessons during our recent Charity Drive, where we assisted with painting and vegetable gardens. Having realised that for every R8.00 we spent on paint, one less child would receive a new toy, we have decided to focus on our core mission: Toys.

On the subject of core mission, when we say Toys for Africa, we really mean it. In 2012 we received our first completed toy catalogues from countries in Africa. Our first reply came from Kenya, our second from Uganda and our third from Botswana. Our first event will be with the Bikers Toy Run in Botswana in October. Even their President will be a part of the Bikers Toys Run and instead of just having a lot of bikers dropping mountains of toys for newspapers and magazines to take pictures, we will assist them to hand the toys out too. We are looking forward to our first trip outside of the Republic and hope we could visit more African countries in the future.

We have been blessed the past week to learn that we would once again be part of the Mall@Reds December plans and if all goes well, we would be able to handout 7 500 toys thanks to them this year. We have also been negotiating with the Mall@Carnival in Brakpan to do a December programme at their mall and we can also announce that we received the backing we needed. Currently it looks like around 5 000 toys will come from this event. Thus our December plans currently promise 12 500 toys. And we will actively be seeking to up that figure to 30 000 minimum.