Wendy house project to enhance services for abused children at The Almond Tree

On July 28, Matsemela, Krauses & Ngubeni Inc. Attorneys (MKN), Seeff Boksburg and Seeff Benoni gathered at The Almond Tree, in Cloverdene, to unveil the first of many sponsored wendy house.

A joint venture between the three sponsors led to massive amounts of excitement shown on all the children’s faces.

Zina Rotherham, The Almond Tree development manager, did one of her community calls, where she posted her idea of the wendy house project on Facebook.

Denis Brandjes, property specialist for Seeff Boksburg and Benoni and his partner, Samantha Watt, then put their heads together and brought on MKN Attorneys to put this project into action.

“Denis and Sam have always done a lot of community work because they love to help wherever they can. Denis is also part of Rotary Benoni so I am sure they plan to assist as many places as they can over and above what they have done already for us here at The Almond Tree. We are so thankful for them, Seeff and MKN for this awesome donation,” explained Rotherham.

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“We hope to gain more sponsors to help us put up more wendy houses as they are going to benefit the children in all sorts of ways. Each wendy house will be set up as a themed room in your normal house, this one we have now is a kitchen, so that the children can act out scenarios and really work through their trauma.

“A lot of the children that come here have had massive amounts of trauma and are not always able to tell you what happened or what’s wrong. This project is to allow the children to work through their trauma; playing in normal housing situations helps to calm the brain, and show the children what most of them haven’t even experienced.

“It will also help them to understand what is wrong and right, much of the trauma these children have been through leaves them to not always understand that what has happened to them is actually wrong,” explained Rotherham.

During the lockdown, staff at The Almond Tree thought things were going to become abnormally difficult, but with a strong-built community, they remained afloat. We were really nervous when lockdown and Covid-19 happened, we took in so many abandoned babies and children during this time that we eventually had to start turning them away as we already house 40 babies and that’s excluding the toddlers and young children.

“We took in nine babies and three children within the first few weeks of lockdown, our ratio went from 1:5 to 1:8. We had to stop volunteers from joining for safety reasons; therefore, some of our staff moved onto the property for lockdown times, but others that weren’t able to had to stop coming through, leading us to staff shortages.” explained Rotherham.

“Just when we thought we had reached a point where everything was going to go down, the community of Benoni didn’t stop, we would put out a call for a new microwave or washing machine and we would have it within days from someone donating within the community.

“There was an abundance of food coming in from the community but also our two sponsors Pick n Pay Oakfields and The Falls SPAR as well as blankets from Rynfield Drapers. We are ever so grateful to be in a community of so many givers,” concluded Rotherham.

The Almond Tree is always in need of groceries but they are in dire need of nappies, baby wipes, clothes and shoes for children aged four to 12.

They go through 9 000 nappies a month and with more babies coming in, nappies are needed.

The Almond Tree has a ‘Commit R100 programme’ which they started due to lockdown, all you have to do is sign up to donate R100 a month for how ever long.

If they have 100 people donating R100 a month this will help them buy groceries for a whole year, they also have an online order system in which you can use to have anything you would like to donate, delivered straight to them.

For more information on the ‘Commit R100 programme’, contact Zina Rotherham at 065 300 2601.

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