Sunday Mukhazi (5) leaping around on a Cape Town beach in August 2010, was burned by rebels in the DRC. What a difference love and surgery make, when combined.
|
Follow Children of Fire on:
7th June 2010
Winter warning (southern hemisphere)
Children of Fire helped survivors of two domestic fires in the past week, in formal brick-built housing in Alexandra Township.
Both fires were triggered by electrical faults.
The first was in the three-roomed home of an asthmatic diabetic woman Nomsombuluko Zulu (55) in 19th Avenue, who also had high blood pressure, had suffered a heart attack and was in hospital before the fire. She had an oxygen cylinder in her house, to help with her asthma.
When the fire started as flames came out of an electrical socket, maybe it could have been contained. But with the oxygen cylinder, there was no chance. It exploded.
Her daughter Nolwazi Zulu (31) her sister (36), her daughter Masadi (18) a matriculant, two of her sister's sons Gift (14) and Sipho (16), were among the extended family who lost all their possessions.
Another fire in 9th Avenue three days later was also attributed to an electrical fault. Jack Makhupetsi, a taxi driver lost everything he owned apart from a sofa that his neighbours dragged out for him.Neither family had any insurance for their homes, nor for the contents.
Now while most of those that we help are burned in squatter camp homes and rural huts, people are also burned in formal housing.
Fires and burns increase in winter months.
This is just your own safety reminder.
If there is a power cut, and you use a candle, use it in a secure holder and not near a curtain or anything else likely to come near the flame.
Do not stick it on a saucer, but use a proper holder. Even a jam jar half-filled with sand is better than a saucer.
Do not place a "night light" or short fat candles directly on the edge of a bath - most modern baths are made of a type of plastic and if the candle is forgotten, it will melt through the plastic and start a house fire.
Do not leave candles unattended and do not leave children alone with candles or access to candles and matches.
Buy a fire extinguisher.
Get it serviced once a year.
Buy a smoke alarm.
Teach your family an escape route.
Identify the weakest family members (little ones and grandparents usually) and talk about how they would get out if there was a fire.
Agree where the keys are and make sure even young children learn how to use them.
Teach the children to crawl low under smoke (the air is cleanest close to the ground).
Teach children to get out, even if the grownups keep sleeping (maybe already overcome by smoke).
Check your household electricity.
80 per cent of electrical compliance certificates (in South Africa) are false.
Now in a recession you think you cannot afford to make your electricity safer. Can you afford to die?
The most common burns are still due to hot liquids. Boiling pots on the stove reached for by a curious toddler's hand, can leave a child without a scalp for ever.
Mothers drinking hot tea with their child on their laps, cause devastating injury when the child suddenly moves and the tea spills all over them.
Don't misuse appliances. Heaters are not clothes driers.
Stoves are not heaters.
Bar heaters are not peanut roasters.
Winter is a time of danger. Avoid it. You know how.
When some Saab employees came to visit us in 2010 we shared one of the children's favourite treats with them - unique fresh doughnuts. For the longest time the children have been asking to go to a "Doughnut factory" because they want to get closely involved in making the pastry. But our closest doughnut store - Pick n Pay Campus Square - hasn't succumbed to a year of pleading yet...
LONDON, 22nd January 2010 Children of Fire International held a sponsored Monopoly Moonwalk to raise money for Africa's first burns charity.
Starting at the Old Kent Road Fire Station at 14h30 Greenwich Meantime, the city slickers in hiking boots walked the walk and talked the talk along a life-size Monopoly game. The 19 kilometre route visited all 26 streets and stations (and did not go to jail!) on the Monopoly board, by foot.
As they walked under half a moon and an abundance of street lights, they tried to get the public to think half-a-globe-away to Africa. To a place where most children don't even have the luxury of electric light and go to bed by candle glow. To a place where simple candles become the cause of injury so devastating that it is hard for us to imagine.
But back in 1997 Britons did imagine. British newspapers and television carried the story of Dorah Mokoena; a baby girl who lost her face in a fire. At that time people dug deep and Dorah flew to London for surgery in Moorfield Eye Hospital, and more complex procedures at St Mary's in Roehampton and at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
Because of the tremendous help from the doctors, and the dedication of two kind Britons who put their lives on hold for Dorah, she was helped through more than 26 operations... imagine one for each stop on the Monopoly Borad. This is how charity Children of Fire started; it has gone on to rebuild hundreds more severely-injured children.
Britons Bronwen Jones and her London-born son Tristan subsequently made Dorah a permanent member of their family. Tristan (born in St Thomas's Hospital opposite Parliament), became the youngest volunteer fire fighter in
South Africa at the age of 16, worked on solving Rwandan genocide cases also at 16, and two years later qualified as an ambulance assistant. That's how helping Children of Fire shapes one for life.
In the aftermath of Christmas and the rigours of the recession, people think they can't afford to help. But poverty is always relative. Morally you can't afford not to help.
Each year thousands of children in Africa are burned. For those who fight to survive, recovery feels interminable; disfigurement is life long. These brave children undergo years of painful expensive surgery to regain quality of life. They endure bullying, staring, ridicule.
Children of Fire rebuilds these heroic kids. With world-leading surgery, schooling and even climbing to the highest point of Africa with them, it loves them back to life.
Money is needed to continue this amazing work. Sponsor the walkers; make a donation. Take a year away from icy Albion and make a difference in Africa.
Click on map for a larger view
People with the Barracuda email vetting system installed e.g. the Botswana government, cannot receive emails from the charity as Barracuda blocks our address for no logical reason. We object to paying a fee for Barracuda's approval, when we already use the Internet responsibly; please provide non-Barracuda-shielded email addresses for communications.
The Johannesburg School for Blind, Low Vision and Multiple Disability Children thanks Crawford Preparatory School, Lonehill for helping our little school to survive in November 2009.
Holes in the Head Surgery
Children of Fire in cooperation with the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital and Milpark, Netcare, is running a Calvarial Defect workshop from 30th November till 8th December 2009.
Dr Walter Künzi and Dr Merlin Guggenheim from Zurich University Hospital, Switzerland will be exchanging knowledge on the causes of holes in the head and ways of repairing such injury with the South African medical fraternity. One of the possible techniques which they will demonstrate involves harvesting ribs and grafting them across the bony deficit (the hole). A vital procedure to ensure the protection and safety of the brain.
In addition to surgery on calvarial defects, there will be a wide range of advanced surgery taking place on severely burned children.
If you are interested in attending lectures on 30th November 2009 or attending and participating in the operations taking place between the 1st and 7th December, please email firechildren@icon.co.za or phone 011 726 6529. Medical personnel have to provide a brief CV and their HPCSA registration number.
Alternatively if you know a child or even an adult who's got a hole in the head, please get in touch with Children of Fire.
Children with fourth-degree flame burns to the head in infancy are most likely to have holes in their skulls, but these holes can also occur when people survive electrocution, sometimes through birth defects, delay in the fontanelle closing, car crashes or other severe injury.
15th October 2009.
Children of Fire has absolutely NO link with something called "Ventures" in Italy.
An email scam and a website scam / blog / is being sent around, with photos of our children taken by John Moore of Getty Images and our story, but soliciting money into two bank accounts in Italy.
DO NOT send money to those bank accounts.
It is fraud and theft. It will not benefit our children at all and it is being stolen by people unknown to us.
Additionally the use of Mr Moore's pictures is copyright theft.
Go to Children of Fire The Movie.com
Children of Fire the Movie will be shown at the Bangkok Film Festival in September 2009; the Tokyo Film Fest in October 2009; the Aluta Film Festival in South Africa in January 2010 and might also be shown at the events in Toronto, Sundance and the AFI.
Behind "Children of Fire The Movie"
Final Push! Children of Fire, the Movie
Children of Fire International is hosting a Monopoly Moonwalk around London, UK on 22nd January 2010.
It will be fun to follow the famous board game by foot on a real cityscape and the event will raise awareness of injury and will fundraise as well.
For more information, email oliver.kilvert@gmail.com
fund raising event that will be held at University of Johannesburg,
9 May 2009
AlexandrA Xenophobia 2008!!!
Happy kids in the garden at 58, December 2007!!
On top of Kilimanjaro July 2007!!
This is the website of the sister charities:
Children of Fire International
(registered in England and Wales, Number 1088785) and
Children of Fire
(registered in South Africa, Number IT121180/98).
The British-based charity evolved from the Dorah Mokoena Charitable
Trust and encompasses its aims.
The charities aim to help young survivors of burn injuries (whether by fire, chemicals, electricity or hot liquids) in Africa and to help and educate the communities in which they live, providing both prevention and cure.
Contact the director Bronwen Jones for details.
Johannesburg School for Blind, Low Vision and Multiple Disability Children
PO Box 1048, Auckland Park 2006, Gauteng Province, South Africa
Tel: (011) 726 6529
Fax: (011) 482 4258
Email: firechildren@icon.co.za
|
