An 88 year old man walks 700km to help rebuild children's home
ON SEPTEMBER, 8 2021, a fire broke out at Thárros Family Centre in Hankey, Eastern Cape.
Its founder Thérèse Sampson received a phone call from one of its staff, Khuselo Lloyd. ‘Thárros is burning!’ he cried.
‘Thárros (courage in Greek) is a safehouse for around 100 children under 12 years old who have experienced trauma, particularly neglect, abandonment or abuse, and aims to reunite them with their families.
Sixteen of those children were living in the Centre when the fire broke out, with their carers.
Now they huddled outside in the dark as wailing fire engines approached, watching their bedrooms burn.
Sampson and her husband Loren raced to the centre. As she witnessed the blaze ravage one side of the building and cause smoke damage to other areas, she thought, why?
She thought of the close connection she’d formed with both her brother’s children, how she’d take the children of the workers who lived on her father’s apple farm in Grabouw horse-riding.
Of studying social work at Rhodes University and volunteering her expertise to the Joshua Project to help children living on the streets in Jeffreys Bay.
And, fondly, when Loren, an avid off-road motorcyclist, chanced upon the 100-year-old building in Hankey after one of his adventure rides in the Baviaanskloof.
He’d told her the two-storey home with its huge bedrooms, bathrooms, thick walls and wooden floors was perfect for children.
They’d have space to run down to the river on hot days, or walk on the nearby farm’s network of gravel paths.
She remembered moving in with Thárros’s first intake in 2017, with whom she lived until she found other women to help her, sacrificing time with her family, her youngest son, Liam, in particular.
Now that Thárros was uninhabitable, social workers had to transfer the children to alternative care. A family of local farmers opened their homes to all 16 children and their carers that night.
Neighbours brought buckets of water to help extinguish the fire, and donated mattresses and food.
Sampson would need to close the centre’s doors to restore the building and renovate some of the older parts, such as windows and plumbing, to the tune of R2 million.
She had an idea. Her father Bradley had promised her some time before that, when he turned 90, he’d make a big splash about doing a charity walk from Somerset West to Hankey.
She had no doubt he could do it. He’d walked the entire length of the Camino de Santiago, 900km from the French town of St Jean Pied-de-Port in the Pyrenean foothills to Santiago de Compostela cathedral in Spain, and rambles 10km most days in natural spaces surrounding his home.
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