Refilwe means "gift" or "to give" in Tswana. Refilwe Community Center began in April 1991 when Jean Stewart and Yvonne Jaques started a clinic on a small site next to the Lanseria Airport, North of Johannesburg. From this grew a wider ministry to the needy people of the area that currently focuses on addressing critical needs in the following areas: medical attention, child care/education, life and specific skills training, and income-generating activities. Refilwe Community Center serves a severely disadvantaged community heavily affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, limited education, unemployment, and poor housing.
ASTEP began its partnership with Refilwe in November of 2008, working directly with the center's Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (or OVC, Africa's official term for children without parents), as well as children in the surrounding township. The 'God Parents Project' is Refilwe's 'non-institutionalized' solution to caring for these at-risk youth sent to them by the government. Instead of allowing these children to become one of 20 other children sent to an orphanage, shelter, or refugee camp, Refilwe places OVCs in the God Parents Project with a family unit in which the parents, under the guidance and supervision of Refilwe, take responsibility for the child's educational, emotional, and physical development.
ASTEP also works with children involved in Refilwe's partnership with Infinite Family, an American NPO that makes it possible for adults anywhere in the world to directly and regularly interact with a Refilwe OVC. Through regularly scheduled face-to-face video conversations and email, adults will mentor these children with schoolwork, job training, and life skills.
ASTEP volunteer educators are sent to Refilwe to use the arts as a means to augment the common goals of all three partners: encouraging the children to make the most of the technological offerings of Infinite Family, enlivening accountability to their community, and using ASTEP curriculum to teach HIV/AIDS education and awareness. To accomplish this, ASTEP provides the OVCs of Refilwe basic dance, drama, music, poetry, and playwriting workshops during their holiday break (November through January).
ASTEP has been sending volunteers to work with children in Africa since 2005. In 2006, ASTEP established the first ever Art Section in a township school library affiliated with the Ubuntu Education Fund in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The impetus behind this project was to expose and provide the township children with inspirational material about people who are either from their area or who come from similar backgrounds. The aim was to motivate children, and inspire them by example, to pursue their creative abilities and their truest interests. By the project's end, ASTEP donated over 150 books, CDs, and DVDs - including novels, plays, biographies, poetry, artwork catalogues, dance concerts, and music recordings - encompassing the works of South African and African-American artists.
In 2007, ASTEP expanded its collaboration with Ubuntu through a number of exciting initiatives. In collaboration with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and the Ubuntu Education Fund, we led a five-week program of arts workshops for 47 children, hand-selected by Ubuntu from townships in Port Elizabeth. Participants in this program were exposed to a once-in-a-lifetime experience arts-awareness field trip in which our team of volunteer artist educators traveled with them on a 3-day bus tour to visit Johannesburg, where they attended a performance of The Lion King, an Athol Fugard play at the Market Theater, a rehearsal of RENT, and visited the Apartheid Museum. 2007 also marked the first year ASTEP exposed any of its students to the art of tap dancing, thanks to several tap shoe drives held by local dance studios and the donation of 100 pairs of tap shoes supplied by the Capezio Dance Factory Outlet in New Jersey. Also, two of our long-term students received full scholarships to attend a local ballet academy during the following school year. Additionally, ASTEP collaborated with the Yale Alumni Chorus on their Power of Song Tour for a wonderful benefit presentation in honor of the successes of the Ubuntu Education Fund.
In 2008, ASTEP partnered with two new organizations to further its reach and affect change in the lives of over 300 additional South African children. In September, ASTEP sent its volunteer educators to Global Camps Africa's Camp Sizanani. In November of that year, ASTEP sent four volunteer educators to Refilwe and provided, for the first time, an interactive, in-person arts experience for those special children. ASTEP continues to bring its curriculum to the Refilwe children through its interactive arts workshops and will return to Refilwe in November of 2010.
Over 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. Seventy-four percent of these individuals live in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006, UNAIDS/WHO, in collaboration with the Department of Health, published that 5.5 million South Africans live with HIV (around 11% of the total population). The ASSA predicts that by 2015, that number will exceed 6 million people, by which time approximately 5.4 million will have died of AIDS. In Uganda, the virus has killed approximately one million people, and significantly reduced life expectancy. As a result, Uganda has experienced severe depletions in its labor force, reductions in agricultural output and food security, and declines in educational and health services.
In Africa, prevention is made harder by poverty, lack of resources, and weak infrastructure. Only around one in ten Africans has been tested for HIV and knows whether they are infected, and misconceptions about transmission routes are widespread. As a result, most countries have yet to see any decline in their epidemics.
14,000 victims are infected with HIV everyday (95 percent in developing countries), an alarming number of whom are children. Coined the "disease of young people", the virus infects approximately 5 million new victims each year, more than half of whom (approximately 280,000 children) are younger than 15. Even if a child does not fall victim to the virus, many suffer from the loss of their parents and family members from AIDS. The UN estimates that, currently, there are 14 million AIDS orphans, and that by 2010 there will be 25 million. Once orphaned, these children are more likely to face poverty, lack of access to education, and even death. One in six AIDS orphans in Africa are likely to die from preventable causes by the age of five.
Currently, only 57% of African children are enrolled in primary education, and one in three of these children will not complete school. More girls are deprived of an education in Africa than in any other continent in the world.
Africa is, in short, the continent worst affected by the AIDS pandemic. In recent years, however, reports have demonstrated slowly declining rates, due, in large part, to behavioral changes. In 2006, UNAIDS reported that since the 1990s, condom use has increased while young people have actively refrained from premature sexual activity or having multiple sexual partners, and suggested that such activity may explain the decreases in HIV prevalence in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and other parts of southern Africa. Trends such as these highlight the importance of HIV/AIDS awareness education. It is our hope that through our arts education programs we may bring these increasing levels of accountability to youth in the sub-Sarahan region.
