Our Trip Down Memory Lane this month brings us to Pretoria in South Africa. This article was first published in Mercy Live newspaper in June 2001. The author of this article, Sr. Goretti Rule still continues her ministries in South Africa. For more information on Mercy House, please click here.
Mercy House – Pretoria
The Sisters of Mercy began their ministry to the people of Capital Park Pretoria in 1923. Over the years the Sisters taught in the school, ministered in the parish, visited prisons, hospitals and the sick poor in their homes. They reached out to the neighbouring rural areas and were instrumental in the founding of Mercy institutes in Mmakau and Winterveldt. In 1998, the centenary year of the arrival of the Sisters in South Africa, it was decided that a fitting way to mark this occasion would be to reach out to women and their children who were homeless, or had been forced out of their homes onto the streets.
Mercy House, 407 Flower Street, Pretoria, is a shelter for women and children. It opened its doors in October 2000
A house was bought in 1999 and after a lot of negotiations, Mercy House opened its doors to the first woman in October 2000. Since then there has been a steady flow of women in dire circumstances into the safety of Mercy House. Homelessness of women, which is becoming an increasingly big problem in South African cities, has many causes.
However, we can almost always trace some kind of discrimination resulting in impoverishment, at the base of the stories of misery and distress.
We meet women who endure abuse from their husbands, often for years on end, because they are financially dependent on them for their own and their children’s survival. The lack of good education offered to girls in times past, still a factor to be contended with, placed many women in an unenviable position of dependency. One woman who has been with us since opening, has reared a family of five, but being illiterate, can only hold unskilled jobs.
Lucy was abused throughout her life and finally took to alcohol to escape the daily pressures which she could no longer bear. After a time her alcoholism became so bad that even her adult children could no longer tolerate her in their homes.
We have employed as ‘house mothers’, women from the rural areas where they received their initial training in a Mercy clinic where they worked as volunteers. These ladies are now being given the opportunity to up-grade their skills by attending practical courses in working with people at the University of South Africa and through in-service training to become assistant social workers. In its own way, Mercy House has enhanced these four women’s lives enormously.
Linda Kirwisa, our qualified social worker, is, at present, doing a master’s degree in HIV/Aids and hence has sharpened our focus on what is a major issue for South Africa at this time. As an outreach from Mercy House we have started an HIV/AIDS education project.
Waiting for the doors to open for shelter for the night at Strabane Mercy House, 98 Kerk St. Johannesburg
Our project targets the ‘forgotten’ domestic and unskilled workers in the area, the unemployed as well as commuters at the two local train stations. It’s amazing how people who are in a desperate hurry, suddenly find time to slow down and ask questions when they see our team. We have also been amazed at the level of ignorance around the subject which still obtains. Our next step is to provide counselling services at local workplaces and to lobby the local government for medical services to be made more convenient to the workers.
At the moment we are having some renovations done so that we will be able to increase the number of women to twenty, not to mention the children. We also hope to have a small oratory where those who wish, can find rest for their sad and troubled hearts. The upgrading of a tool shed into a ‘skills’ training workshop will be a valuable addition and most useful in helping women to acquire finance-generating skills which they can practise at home and without any overheads. We have been blessed by the gifts, inspired by the generosity of so many people and are very busy formulating proposals for further donations to enable us to give the best service we can to our guests.
Residents of Immaculata Hall Shelter, Rosebank, Johannesburg enjoy a cup of tea and a chat
There are three shelters for the homeless within the South Africa Province: Immaculata Hall adjacent to St. Catherine’s Convent in Rosebank and Strabane Mercy Centre, near the City Centre in Johannesburg. Mercy House is situated in Pretoria and was recently opened. It was one of the three centenary projects undertaken by the South African Province during their jubilee year in 1998.
Goretti Rule rsm
South African Province
