KasCare Links up with UK Charity for Cosmic Blanket

In a sign that KasCare is gaining traction, we have agreed to help a major charity drive drive our knit-a-square project into the United Kingdom and India.

The approach has come from Oasis, a 20-year-old British charity founded by the Rev. Steve Chalke. It’s renowned for the work it does for underprivileged children and women in the UK, India and now Africa.

The project focuses on a new housing development called Cosmo City, north of Johannesburg. It is aimed at re-settling some of the squatters and the orphans who have been moved on from areas we have previously served. They include some of the children from Zieverfontein and River Bend settlements who have featured in previous Square Circle e-zines.

Despite its celestial name, Cosmo City faces all the earthly difficulties common to the poor and the dispossessed. Shortages of funds, amenities, infrastructure, utilities, pre-schools and schools are a constant.

Oasis tells us unemployment, violence and illness are common in the settlement, with the corresponding difficulties magnified for orphans and abandoned children. Child-led households remain a major issue.

Oasis has set itself a clear and, we think, very achievable challenge. They have asked us (KasCare and knit-a-square) to help them introduce the knit-a-square program into the Cosmo City project itself. The challenge is clear and exciting: 500 blankets by the end of May.

Here’s how it works. The orphans and children benefit from your mighty work knitting and crocheting squares and sending them to South Africa for beautiful blankets.

Then, Oasis staff will take your squares to their ante-natal clinic and teach expecting mothers – many of them teenage girls without partners or help – to sew them into blankets for their child.

The most important part of the project is the hope – slim, yes, but impossible, no – that this form of help will lessen the rate of child abandonment. Given this small learning, and one which could with help and sponsorship grow into an income-earning skill, these young women may see a faint light instead of perpetual darkness.

And finally, here’s some news that will lift the hearts of KasCare knitters and crocheters. Oasis is looking at introducing KasKids, our school program, to its educational partners in both the UK an India. How exciting to think that another generation of young crafters might take up their needles and hooks to bring about a better world.