Ke Moja Project at the Laingsburg Thusong Service Centre - “I’m Fine without Drugs”

- By Marlene Hendricks

August 2010

The Ke Moja Project which aims to prevent substance abuse amongst the youth has been located at the Laingsburg Thusong Service Centre. The project’s objective is to promote healthy lifestyles through education and counseling.  Substance abuse has become a huge problem in the Western Cape especially in Laingsburg with many deaths amongst teenagers resulting from it. 

The Ke Moja project, initiated in February 2010 is the brain child of the Department of Social Development, and has since been deployed by the department to all centers in the province.

The project prides itself with trained staff and two lay councilors consisting of the centre manager Mr Steven Schippers and Mr Douglas Horn.

The role of the Lay councilors is firstly to ensure that the physiological and physical status of beneficiaries have been screened before potential clients are being referred to professionals for counseling and treatment. The project also has six Ke moja fieldworkers that are operating inside and outside the Centre.

To date the project has a total of 90 participants, some are school going while others are attended at the Centre on a daily basis.  Ke Moja explores all avenues in the community to inform citizens about the dangers of substance abuse by utilizing platforms such as, church meetings and sport gatherings.
 
The project focuses on skills development, real life situations and coaching to maximize ones real potential. The project’s mantra is “Knowledge is not power, rather knowledge is potential power, and it only becomes power when applied”, this assist participants to apply their knowledge and to honor their commitments.

Daily activities of the Ke Moja project include physical activity and healthy life styles.  General sessions include topics such as the describing what drugs are, nutrition, fetal alcohol syndrome, taking control sessions as well as team building sessions.

The participants are also exposed to capacity building programs like personal shield, basic presentation skills, body movement, voice expression, and articulation and facilitation skills.

The outcome of the Ke Moja project is to ensure that the project reaches the youth to the extent that they can become self reliant, know the dangers of substance abuse and can be able to better their lives by the information and knowledge that they gained.

“Change will not come if we wait for some other people or some other time, we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek”.  President Barack Obama