Nine of our dads or dads-to-be had the wonderful opportunity to be introduced to The World Needs A Father https://www.theworldneedsafather.com/, a global movement of fathers committed to building unbreakable families and healthy communities. Throughout the year they attended a series of discussion sessions with a mentor, Gerhard van Eck, and all of them have enthusiastic testimonies of the value this added to their personal lives and their families.
Even in our rural community fatherlessness and/or uninvolved fathers have become the norm, with serious consequences for the individual children and the community as a whole. As Stephen Baskerville has summarised it: “Virtually every major pathology has been linked to fatherlessness”.
Our ECD centre educators organised a community dinner with the theme The World Needs A Father as a first step towards a future in which we will keep on focussing on this topic. The ECD kids participated with enthusiasm and decorated the table cloths and made pictures of the men in their lives to decorate the walls; the team of men who attended the course helped prepare food and music for the evening and shared their thoughts with the other parents; and our older kids in the guitar group (taught by a dad of course) entertained their moms and dads.
Can nine men make a difference? Yes, when the community embraces the chance to work towards a difference and that is the hope we have.
