Rock climbing!

On Saturday the 29th August SANFAN took a group of 4 boys from Ocean View rock climbing at Silvermine Nature Reserve. We taught them how to belay, do buddy checks, how to tie figure of 8 and use rock climbing gear. These kids are not any kids plucked out of the street, they are part of what is called the Life Mentoring Programme run by Cobus Oosthuizen from LifeXchange. Have a look at their website http://www.facebook.com/l/fb2a7;www.lifexchange.com but just to give you a quick outline; mentoring structures are done through adventure and extreme sports camps which builds close relationships between mentors and mentees. Cobus runs this organisation on his own with the financial support of friends and family, but he is spread thin attending to every aspect of the organisation from making tea to daily mentorship, management and running the LifeXchange camps. The need we saw is that Cobus requires some extra help taking these kids out and doing adventurous activities with them as he doesn’t have much spare time. The way we filled the need is through providing the opportunity to take them rock climbing.

We plan to do an outing with LifeXchange the last Saturday of every month, either surfing or rock climbing. But what we would like to see is this happening every weekend or second weekend and maybe working on a roster system so that it would only be one Saturday a month that you would make yourself available to help. We only need 3 people per Saturday and you don’t need to be skilful in the two sports though having some rock climbing experience will help as we will have to have someone who knows the ‘ropes’ to be there at each rock climbing event.

Please email back and let me know if you are interested in putting your name on a list of people who would like to help with this when you can and then we can contact you as the events start coming up. And if we get enough response we will put together a roster.