After giving our project a lot of thought I decided to start making our once a month visits by the orphan children a skills day.

I realised that we had to help the children learn new skills in order for them to have choices in their lives. A lot of the children had ideas of becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers and even one wanted to be the president of South Africa one day.

With this in mind I decided to invite friends and family to offer their working skills in our Saturday programme. Our first skills day consisted of first aid (Laetitia Cronje from Campfire Safaris), welding (Glen Thomson from Jejane Private Nature Reserve), computer training (Monica Hoffman) and then the normal horse care and riding.

The children were so excited with the activities and had so much fun bandaging up their friends, making iron stick together and sending their documents from a computer to a printer.

They all walked away from the day excited about what they had learnt!

We started off the new year teaching the children about animal care.

Almost every child had a fear of dogs and was petrified to be around them. My ever faithful dog … Bouncer, showed the children that there was nothing to be scared of. They learnt to play with her, touch her and be comfortable close to her and eventually learnt to love her. Their fear was due to ignorance with working with a dog and I told them to share their new found knowledge with all their friends back at their villages.

Again we spent time with the horses and the children did so well with tacking the ponies up and then fun with the riding.

One of our African Dream students … Rachel, had her ever present guitar close by and the children were in awe learning to play a few notes! Just another great day with the children!

As a Canadian now living in Hoedspruit, I wondered if it would feel like Christmas for me this year without snow.

On December 9th I went to a Christmas party for the orphans from Yellow Elephant School in Acornhoek. The party was held at the Wildlife Equestrian Centre – African Dream Reaches Out. None of the children had ever before seen Santa in person, and only a few had seen him on TV but every single child had heard that Santa brings presents to good children.

Three weeks earlier, on their regular Saturday visit to the stables, each orphan had written a three-item wish list for Santa. I sniffled a bit when, acting as Santa’s helper, I compiled their lists on my laptop. One little girl asked for “blue socks with white stripes”.

After games and treats a bell started ringing and out of the bush walked Santa! The children ran to him with smiles and laughter to help carry his big bag of gifts. One by one, Santa called each child forward, to receive their presents. Without being told the kids waited until everyone had their present before they opened their own.

A little girl, Pride, had put earrings on her list. When receiving her gift I noticed that she did not have pierced ears – I was afraid that I had made a mistake with her list. There had been no mistake this young lady had asked for earrings so that her sister would also receive a Christmas present this year.

One little boy, Yonath, saved his unopened package along with all his treats, one doughnut, a bag of chips and cookies. He told us he was taking it all home so that his grandmother could enjoy everything with him.

After the presents were opened the children sang thank you songs and then continued to sing for over an hour. It really did feel like Christmas! The generosity of everyone who helped make this day so special really impressed me.

There is always a time to learn something new, and today it was all about balancing on a horse and the teaching the children basic vaulting skills.

They were complete naturals and all of them had a trot around and then some of them started to become more adventurous and managed to balance either on one knee or even stand up. Well done to the horses as they were very patient with us and gave the children lots of confidence.

We had some volunteers from various projects who challenged the children to new English words and then the children tried to teach them some Shangaan words … not easy!