While on my most recent adventure into Lesotho, we not only went for the adventure, the Kingsley Holgate Foundation’s “Right to Sight” and Project Rhino KZN’s “Rhino Art” initiatives played a huge part of why we were headed into some of the most remote areas in the mountain kingdom.
Project Rhino KZN, which is head up by Sheelagh Antrobus, organised our first stop at Fairview College in Himeville where kids were asked to colour in their own Rhino Art with their own message about Rhino poaching. The messages written by children as young as 9 years old were pretty powerful and left us all with goosebumps!
Sheelagh and her team do an incredible job at raising awareness to the next generation of leaders, that poaching Rhino’s for their horns is wrong in every way and have even had the support from the Kingsley Holgate Foundation of course, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu as well.
The Kingsley Holgate Foundation itself are a group of really amazing adventurers who travel around Africa and the world doing amazing things wherever they go.
They also travel everywhere with thousands of pairs of reading glasses in a project called “Right for Sight”, so when we were travelling around Lesotho, we stopped at various villages along the way, in search of elderly men and women who’ve lost their sight through the years so they could gift them their sight once again with a pair of these readers.
Just stop for a minute and look at the face of this villager below.
This is the face of a man who’s just read something for the first time in YEARS! I was later told what he had said to the translator in Basotho, which was that he was so happy because now it won’t take him 20 minutes to thread a needle anymore. This left me thinking that I really do take life for granted…
Another amazing moment was when this lady was ask if she could read a paragraph on their eye test sheet in her head.
However, she didn’t read it in her head, she started reading out loud in English with the most beautiful voice and no fumbles at all. It left me with a huge lump in my throat to witness something like that first hand and it was only then that it dawned on me how amazing the “Right for Sight” initiative actually is.
Needless to say, this adventure in Lesotho left me with a great deal of compassion for these Basotho mountain people and how these amazing people live such simple lives compared to the “daily struggle” of city life.
Thank you Kingsley Holgate and Sheelagh Antrobus for everything you two are doing not only for Mama Africa, but human kind too!
Check out the Project Rhino KZN website and the Kingsley Holgate Foundation Facebook Page for more on what they get up to.
