When Rosie Mashale moved to Khayelitsha in Cape Town (South Africa’s largest township) she was alarmed to see children scavenging for food in the trash dump near her home.  So one day in 1989, she invited some of them over.  “I just called them in.  We sang rhymes, I gave them bread and something to drink — and that was the birth of the daycare center.”  She continued to offer free care for local children for the following 10 years, and after a decade of doing so, she was thinking about retiring for good.  And yet her plans changed again in 2000 when she found a young child abandoned on her doorstep.  And when she took the boy to the police, he couldn’t provide them with his own name, and so Rosie was told that she should care for him. And that is what she did … Word quickly spread, of course, and soon afterwards another child was left at her doorstep.   And she took that child in as well.  And then she got a call from a maternity hospital, asking her to pick up two abandoned babies – which she did as well. By the end of the year, “Mama Rosie” was caring for 67 children, all in her own home.

 

Since then, her orphanage – called Baphumelele, which translates to “we have transcended” —  has blossomed into a multi-faceted charitable organization (which now includes a school that educates over 230 children) that takes up an entire block in Khayelitsha, and that has ended up over the years caring for more than 5000 orphaned, abandoned, or sick children.

 

“I support change, innovation, and human advancement.  I am strongly committed to a humanitarian cause and social improvement. I wish to contribute something of value to the world, or at least to my community.” ~ Rosie Mashale

 

Filed under: In LOVE with Humanity by Scaughdt