The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Gaborone West at the weekend held its sixth annual African Helping Hands Day community service project by renovating Gaborone West Phase 1 recreational park.
This project, held on Saturday, was also done to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Church’s welfare program.
The day was marked by the theme “Strengthening families and building communities.” This voluntary community service was also done in different parts of Gaborone. At the Gaborone West recreational park, men and women volunteers took part in the exercise to refurbish the worn-out park. The Helping Hands project decided to put a new fence and to paint wood and metallic poles at the park.
“The helping hand project is a method our church uses to mobilize volunteer labour for worthy causes and also to show love and appreciation to the communities that we serve in,” said the project coordinator, Rudi Oscar Esterhuizen. “Here in Gaborone, we as the Gaborone West 2 ward of the Latter Day Saints have realize that our kids are in danger of roaming the streets because of lack of play grounds. That is why we have decided to show our local community through a Helping Hands project of renovating this dilapidated recreational park on which we are standing now. We hope that after renovating this park, our kids here in Gaborone West will have a place where they can play and have fun.”
He added: “It is our hope that at the end of this day, we will actually have built the Gaborone West community and hopefully strengthened the Gaborone West families as well.”
This humanitarian effort was also done by other church members around Africa, allocating themselves with tasks to serve communities they live in. Esterhuizen described his church as instrumental in many humanitarian services. He said the church had also donated wheel chairs to the Ministry of Health and sponsored the measles campaign years ago. In other ways to show compassion, the church also brings relief to areas like Japan and Haiti that were hit by natural disasters.
