Kerus Orphan Care Center—A Powerful Force for Positive Change in South Africa! 

It’s hard to imagine, but South Africa has an estimated 2 million orphans!  We can’t help them all, but we at KC4K can help some. And that’s why we’re so excited to announce our latest project—this one in partnership with Kerus Global Education. We’re helping to build the Kerus Orphan Care Center near Pretoria, and it will be ready for kids in January.

Currently operating out of a local church until the building is done, the interim Orphan Care Center will soon have a brand new permanent home. This is in large part to a $55,000 gift from KC4K that helped complete and outfit the building! 

Welcoming crisis-weary children into a place of help and hope, the Center will offer life-changing support to the AIDS orphans of Soshanguve, a community known for extreme poverty.  Here, a staggering number of children live in child-headed households. The only meal of the day for many has been a small bowl of porridge they get at school. 

What Kids Get at the Orphan Care Center – Besides Love!

The Center will begin with 50 school-age children carefully selected by the neighboring school and will expand to 100 orphans who will receive services every day of the year ... services like these:

• Meals 7 days week
• Monthly food parcels to take home (provided by KC4K for all of 2009)
• Day care for pre-school children
• Homework help
• Health care
• Trauma and grief counseling
• Character training
• Skills training in gardening, computers, and handicrafts

The Care Center is the brainchild of Drs. Marcia Ball and Jennie Cerullo, two professional educators who founded Kerus Global. [Some have said that if you want to see what Kendall Ciesemier might be like as an adult, you could take a close look at these two energetic and passionate women!] 

Kerus means “to do something with your whole heart or passion.”

Strongly supported by principal of the local school and a local church, the interim Orphan Care Center is already becoming a powerful force for positive change in the community.  With a permanent building, it will be a place of HOPE that will shape kids’ lives for years to come.