About: Good Hope Home Based Care

Good Hope Home Based Care (GHBC) is a non-profit organization located in the Tembisa Township [to view map, click HERE] - Johannesburg, South Africa. Founded as a care station and clinic to the diseased and disables of the surrounding neighborhood, GHBC has taken the role of shelter for abandoned infants and children, many of them HIV positive. Currently, GHBC is responsible for close to 400 orphans living with families in the neighborhood by advocating for their education and providing food and monetary support to the foster families, themselves often living in the dredges of poverty. Good Hope's approach is holistic in nature - they distribute donated foods, clothing, medical supplies, text books, and toys to their community. Currently, they are constructing a youth center to provide orphaned and vulnerable children with temporary housing, afterschool programs, and a day care. For 12 years, the organization has trained care-givers to confront the diseased and dying. Tembisa bears the burden of the HIV/AIDs crisis. 31% of people in the Gauteng Province are now living with the life crippling Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Evident that HIV targets the poor and those of African heritage living in South Africa (22 times as many Africans have HIV than white South African citizens), much of GHBC's efforts are spent addressing the horrors that the disease: feeding the dying and the unemployed (simply because of contracting HIV), taking in abandoned children (HIV positive infants are frequently abandoned), providing clinical care to a part of the world where overcrowded and unaffordable hospitals are the norm.

My encounter with Good Hope came about in the summer of 2007 on a trip with the North Alabama Presbytery. Visiting Tembisa only for an afternoon, I met Flora Mogano, the eccentric and strong-willed founder/director of GHBC. Flora's home was also the clinic and care center. In her spare bedroom, she housed 12 orphans. Her garage had become the walk in clinic and office. One of the first things she did was point to a pile of a hundred or so loaves of bread in the corner. "See that?" she said stearnly, "I woke before dawn to beg the store for that bread to feed those who need it." I then proceeded to take the most intense "walk around the block" in my life. I met Freddy who had a catheter stuck in his pocket and though he was most likely terminally ill, he couldn't stop expressing his joy for life and our visit. I held newborn whose mother was in the hospital with meningitis. I sat near Maria, in the last stages of life with AIDS, an intense whooping cough due to Tuberculosis, and a body covered in bumps and scars from a wildly spreading skin cancer. I prayed over a handful inhabitants of a three room house that held 31.

My continuing correspondence with Flora indicates that the fight for justice, alleviation of suffering and poverty is far from over. Car theft, power outages, increasing food costs, hospital and public school staff strikes are only a few of the many challenges GHBC confronts in trying to stay functioning and coherent. In a recent letter, Flora broke from her train of thought only to declare, "Life is full of agonies." I can only hope that her spirit of service remains strong as times are tough.

Currently, Good Hope does not maintain a website.

Good Hope Home Based Care in the News:

The Star (South Africa) - http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=129&fArticleId=382137

Los Angeles Times - http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/26/world/fg-aids26
(since this article, some, but relatively few, inhabitants of the township have had access to anti-retroviral drugs - GHBC continues to rely on the most minimal of medical supplies)

Contact Information:

Postal Address: Good Hope Home Based Care/PO BOX 12114/ Chloorkop, 1624/South Africa
Telephone: (011) 925-0312, (072) 620-2429
Dept Of Welfare Registration #: 013-776/46654NPO
Coordinator: Flora Mogano