Author: Zeng Dieulv

“Ma Berthild” came to us in the year 2009.  

She came from Rwanda attempting to get away from constricting fears and political tensions which had resulted from the Genocide in her country. Once she had found a secure base with us, she brought down her only son, Dioscor. “Ma B” has been with us for 13 years now, and we hope she will stay, as she has become our house mother and is an integral part of the family. 

 We were able to put Dioscor into the excellent Dominican Convent School, where he matriculated. He then asked us if we could help him to do a degree in Supply Chain Management, which, we are told, is a very good choice relevant to our modern situation. Thanks to our very supportive Holy Family Sisters, we were able to commit to supporting this 4-year degree with UNISA, a distance learning university, and he is now halfway through, doing very well. 

Dioscor’s amazing commitment to these studies is most admirable. In the photo, he is seen with his mother on the right and Mari Bernard, also one of our Mercy family, on the left. In addition to caring for our Mercy House, Ma B has developed a large vegetable garden nearby and on this particular day, they were working in it. Ma B brings her own products to Mercy House and all enjoy the fruits of her labours. We are grateful for Ma B and her son, who are a valuable part of our Mercy community.

On Saturday, 11th June, an outreach group from the Kingdom of Sons Ministries, headed by Ms Rafilwe Dombo, came to give our young people a day of reflection and fun. Following input on the search for meaning of our lives, small workshops were held on relevant topics. This was followed by a good lunch. It seems that it was a valuable exercise and our young people enjoyed it. It also made it clear that our young people are searching and need a lot of guidance.   

See attached photos.

It has been a very refreshing and community-building experience to work together to keep and increase the beauty of our home. Firstly, we thank Diana and Tim Gordon Grant for organizing the revamp of our kitchen. Whilst it had become well-worn, it looks beautiful now, as the photos show.

Then, on 16 June, we had a “Make Mercy House more Beautiful Day”, with all residents available working together, mostly repainting, but also with other needed tasks. Danny and Zama repainted the play centre, Moise, the washline area, Gerald, the food storage cupboard, Buyonde the garden gate, Volunteer Emmanuel from USA and Eddie repainted the window frames, USA volunteer Paige and Masengo did inventories of stationery, linen and toiletries cupboards, as the attached photos show, but there were plenty of other jobs done. All in all, it was an extremely happy and joyful day working together and the results were quite uplifting, and encourage everyone to take extra care of our property in the future.

It has been an enormous blessing to have had our USA volunteers, Paige and Emmanuel, with us for the past 2 years or so. It would take pages to summarize what they have done: it is countless.  They have just moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg, where they will be living until they move at the end of the year, and in the process wanted to shed some of their furniture. We have benefitted from this.  The photos show some of the items donated, the most popular being the “egg chair” which even rocks. Danny has claimed this as his own – see him on the chair – we know that he would become rich if he charged everyone R2.00 for a sitting!  Thank you Paige and Emmanuel for your wonderful support and for giving so much joy to Mercy House.  We are also happy and grateful to announce that Emmanuel has now accepted to become one of the trustees of Mercy House.

In mid-May, after serving as Mercy House leader for several years, our Eddie Dunia decided to hand over the leadership to persons of the younger generation. He will remain with us and serve on our house committee, but in a slightly different capacity. As it is quite a big task, we decided to have two leaders. Dieulv Zeng and Emmanuel Masengo will now be co-leaders. They took on the challenge with great zeal and enthusiasm, and have so far been doing wonders. We are extremely grateful to have such fine young people in charge of our house.

Emmanuel’s passion is photography and he has put a huge amount of dedication into achieving his goal of excellence. We have been able to assist him with a first-class camera for his work. He works free-lance, doing photographs and videos for weddings and any special events. He also gets short-term work from different videography companies, all being valuable experiences on his journey to perfection.

Zeng is in a similar field, and his skills are vast. He does our website, any graphic work that we require, he is helping with the republishing of our book, Tracing the Divine, he helped with the flyer for John’s catering business, to mention just a few of his skills. In addition, he is a computer boffin, and still manages to be doing a 3-year diploma in Digital Animation at an excellent animation school.

Putting all our Mercy House skills together, a picture emerges of talents that weave a beautiful mosaic of our interesting life at Mercy House! We thank God for this….

It’s been 26 years since our Mercy work started. Not SURPRISING then, that a face-lift was necessary and we got stuck into this mid-year. First, we replaced the much-worn wooden lounge floor dating to around 1940, with beautiful new tiles. This has made a huge difference to a dark room. See photo. Next on the list was replacing the sink surround with a granite top. See photo. We then renovated the outside toilet walls and shower with tiling and repainting. Lastly, we repainted our driveway and front wall. A very big thank you to our Danny who played a big part in these renovations voluntarily and also to Builder Eric who we employed to do the tiling. Our home looks so much better now.

Weekly food delivery by St Vincent de Paul Society

To add to all the above upgrades, we also purchased a brand new fridge, with half deep freeze and half fridge. This was essential, since the fridge we were using was already secondhand when we got it and was not working properly and in addition, the doors were not closing well. This brought joy to the residents and is especially important with the hot summer temperatures. 

The photo shows our Masengo, who is the food and fridge keeper, packing food donated weekly by St Vincent de Paul Society into our beautiful new fridge.

All the above, of course, thanks to our benefactors who deposit into our account monthly. Truly GREATLY appreciated. May you be blessed.

Food awaiting disposal

Emmanuel packing food into the new fridge