The Greenock Presbytery of the Church of Scotland heard about our little school and began a drive to collect money, which enabled us to build a new school in a more accessible village. This made transportation easier, and we could also accommodate a lot more children.

Since this generous kick-start, the people of Greenock have been the lifeline of this little community school. We have never received any major funding and without their ongoing help with donations and personal sponsorship for many of the children, the school would have been forced to close its doors long ago. Instead they helped to make Vhutshilo Mountain School an integral part of the community. Our bore-hole supplies water to a community tap and a vegetable garden supplies greens, both to the school and to needy families. We are establishing a Community Library with donated books and computers, which we are using for computer literacy classes. We help foster grandparents, most of whom live on a meagre monthly pension (equivalent to approx. £60 per month!), to access government grants and we also help them with second-hand clothes and food parcels. A Support Group for People Living with AIDS meets once a month and discusses topics like drug adherence, nutrition etc. An Outreach Program was started after a local doctor appealed to us for help as children on the ARV programme were dying through non-compliance. Strict drug adherence is essential for positive results but the care-givers are either too old (and traditional) or school-age siblings and they do not understand the significance of compliance. A campaign to "Empower the Child" to take control of his or her own drug regime is therefore in the beginning stages, and a future plan is to run workshops to educate the local community.

At the moment we have 36 children attending the school. 3 toddlers that are looked after by a woman from the support group and 5 older children from the surrounding villages that we help with drug monitoring, clothes and food parcels. Our staff consists of 2 qualified teachers, a cook/housekeeper (she also sells 2nd hand clothes) a gardener/ cleaner and a VSO student from India.

The aim of the school is to be self-supporting. A soccer stadium is being built next to the school and we are going to sell food, snacks and cool-drinks from a kiosk within the school grounds. Two young teachers from Greenock (Scotland) began a drive to collect soccer strips and this snowballed to such an extent that over 400kg of clothes was flown over with the help of British Airways. This was such a great success that we have decided to sell soccer shirts and call the kiosk "The Scots Soccer Shoppe". We are hoping that people will continue to donate 2nd hand clothes and make it a really viable income generating project.

We are very grateful to the Rev. Jill Clancy from St. John’s Church for giving us the wonderful opportunity to be a participant in the WWW program. Our candidate, Thikhathali, has returned to S.A. full of enthusiasm and brimming with ideas to use what he has learnt to help Vhutshilo on our path towards self-sustainability. Vhutshilo means "life" in Tshivenda, and thanks to the help of all the good folk who have contributed, the school has become a symbol of health and hope in this community riddled by the affects of HIV and AIDS