Hope for abandoned children
MELVILLE – Hotel Hope houses 23 orphans and has helped between 6 000 and 9 000 mothers.
Tucked away near Melville’s busiest strip on 7th Street is a safe haven for abandoned children.
The Hotel Hope orphanage has been around since 2011. The organisation acquired a house in Melville and a year later they expanded to the property next door.
The home has been approved to house 28 children and currently has 23. The youngest in the home is four months old and the eldest seven years old. Renata Noble of Hotel Hope said children come to them from various circumstances – from being abandoned at hospitals to ill-equipped mothers who give birth and give up their babies to the organisation.
Hotel Hope first started with a German missionary (founder) who came to South Africa in 2008. He initially started
the Mothers Intervention Centre in Alexandra which serviced five high schools in 2009 in a bid to address child abandonment at the root cause before the project expanded and later became Hotel Hope.
The centre has since helped more than 2 800 teenage mothers. It includes a 10-week course during which mothers learn how to cope with babies as well as other life skills.
If mothers still feel they can’t cope with having a baby, they are given the option to stay in a safe house until they give birth after which they hand the baby over to the organisation.
In addition to the intervention centre and orphanage, Hotel Hope also has two charity shops in Melville. The shops – Hope Charity shop (corner of Main Street and 2nd Avenue) and Resurrection (corner of 7th Street and 2nd Avenue) – are used as a way to sustain the homes and other initiatives.
The shop on Main Street raises money solely from items people no longer have a use for. “People usually move or clean out their homes and bring things they haven’t used in years to the shop in Main,” Noble said.
Resurrection sells bigger goods they acquire from auctions.
The organisation takes what they can get and turns it into profit to help mothers and children in need. So look no further to donate items or do 67 minutes of goodwill this Nelson Mandela Day.
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