Help selfless Koki
ALEXANDRA – Youth centre seeks donations for selfless carer of nyaope addicts.
The scourge of nyaope and other drugs can be stopped if local businesses and organisations partnered as well as selfless individuals who care and support addicted kids in Alex.
The individuals who are driven by a conscience and desire to save the nation’s future, use their own meagre resources to support other people’s children from total destruction by drugs. One such individual is unemployed Koki Mokoena who feeds and clothes more than 200 children from her 11th Avenue home.
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Her full day is preoccupied with canvassing for support which is often hard to acquire but this doesn’t dent her altruistic spirit. She cooks for them using old and unreliable equipment in a limited space and, has referral arrangements with better-equipped centres in Brakpan, Randfontein, Pretoria and the local Sanca centre.
Touched by her efforts, Siphokazi Mphahlwana of the Alex Youth Advisory Centre urged others to compliment Mokoena’s commitment. “Her work should be a collective, community intervention to save hordes of local children, seen wasting away on the streets daily.
The public shouldn’t just complain and hope for an elusive solution as time wasted, worsens the challenge. Local businesses and families should relieve her of the burden,” Mphahlwana said after a recent donation of mostly girls’ clothes. She asks for more boys’ clothes as they are the majority who Mokoena finds huddled in dishevelled condition at street corners and secluded places with some of them, emancipated by hunger. This rare human quality keeps Mokoena on her toes daily.
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Mphahlwana also urged residents as parents and businesses to open up to the children in order to gain their confidence and refer them to Sanca for counselling and assistance against relapsing.
“Businesses should provide them with jobs to keep them gainfully occupied and with financial freedom for their upkeep. Some of them want to return to school and complete their rehabilitation programme.”
Mphahlwana commended a local mentor’s suggestion for a structured programme saying such would ensure a sustainable intervention and platform for external support to assist thousands of other youths in the centre’s database, some with degrees and in need of jobs and who may gravitate to drugs and crime when left in despair.
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Details: Koki Mokoena 072 243 3180; Siphokazi Mphahlwana 071 581 0482.
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