19th Mar 2024 8:59:31 AM

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Please note:
Please note: Our main "landline" is 011 482 4258 has a battery so it might work during long electrical power cuts that beset South Africa in 2023. Alternatively try to find us on 066 3150 307 (English and Sesotho) or on 071 30 50 100 (NOT for WhatsApp) or +44 7711023116. Thank you for your patience.



Dorah, our Founding Child (far left), who was burned when only six months old, turns 30 years old on 12 April 2024. Here she is with a red mask, when exploring a shopping centre with some of her extended family of burns survivors.

Children of Fire will be taking a different direction in 2024 to focus more on burns-treatment and burns-prevention research. Our Founder Bronwen Jones is also actively looking for a successor to continue her work of the past more-than 27 years. Feel free to email in your CV and motivational letter if you think you fit the bill.

Our current biggest dilemma is the need to buy the sister charity's School building as the owner who had promised it to us in 2003 but did not transfer it formally, has now decided that she wants to sell it. While it is in a suburb of sharply-declining property prices, chances are that it will still be sold for more than we can afford.

There is never a day without surprises at the charity and the chief surprise is human behaviour. Sometimes people are amazingly kind and sometimes their behaviour is shocking. If you want to volunteer with us in any capacity, please understand that the rights of the child are paramount under South African law and that it would never be acceptable to leave them without adult supervision. It would be illegal to do so.

Please also, read the Please Don't section of the website. The skills-shortage locally and globally has made it difficult to find interns of the right calibre for our challenging environment. Please check the Internship section of the website and do not be deterred if closing dates have passed, as it is a rolling recruitment programme. We will no longer take on employees; only interns with or without stipends, volunteers, advisors and occasional independent contractors.

We are grateful to have had help from many South Africans and Britons as well as Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Brazilian, Australian, German, French, Japanese, Norwegian, Dutch, Moroccan and American volunteers. The difficulty in obtaining visas with the ever-changing rules of bureaucrats makes volunteer recruitment difficult. Please volunteer because you have time and inclination to commit about eight meaningful hours of help a day and because you genuinely like children and wish to improve their quality of life. Please do NOT exclude Dorah from your activities with us; she is the Founding Child and notwithstanding her communication difficulties, she is the very heartbeat of our charity. Discard prejudice and take time to know her, because she is a lovely person.

A ten-year-old burned boy who could not get surgery in South Africa is looking for an international solution, maybe in Italy, for operations on his scalp, ear, eye and hand though renewing his travel documentation is difficult. This is a short video of the child on YouTube, where we now have our own channel, thanks to former French volunteer Tiphaine Cramet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5_CfD0jxM

The male German volunteer who maliciously stole our internal hard drive in March 2021 has still not been apprehended by Interpol. The man travelled to Namibia and India, later to Naples in Italy and in mid-2023 was believed to be in Nord Rhein Westphalia, Germany.

During the main Covid-19 pandemic, for most burned children referred to the charity, "elective" surgery stopped. The repercussions will be life-long, because as children grow, if their digits or limbs are contracted by burned skin, their fingers, toes, arms, legs, will not grow to the correct length or in the correct position. The decision to define their surgery as "elective" may e.g. condemn them to limp for the rest of their lives instead of walking with a normal gait. The likely pain of walking with a limp will wear away other bones unevenly and lead to other physical and mental problems. It's not that different to driving through a large pothole and putting car wheels out of alignment - the costs and the damage increase if the problem is not swiftly-identified and resolved.

So, to Children of Fire, everything always feels urgent.

We know the psychological and the physical cost of delay.

And as only a handful of people donate monthly, it is hard to plan far ahead.

What we most want to do while corruption, wars and ineptitude beleaguer the planet, is to try to curb patient intake in SA until mid-2024 and repair large sections of our building. We also want to catch up with typing a backlog of medical records. To make all this information available on a database for medical students to access, will be invaluable, because there are hundreds of interesting cases, devastating injuries, and details of amazing reconstructive surgery.

Burns are not decreasing in Africa, nor further afield, so sharing this information and devising new solutions, is important.

If people with good computer skills and excellent written English have regular time to help, on site, it would be appreciated. They will need to read doctors' seemingly-illegible scrawl and decipher acronyms like FTSG (full thickness skin graft) and a myriad of medical terms. They will need to think logically and work out where information is missing or even, potentially, inaccurate. It is interesting work, best done by people with university-level education, enquiring minds, meticulous attention to detail and an interest in medicine.

We also need better new computers, better software and help with installing solar power so that we can work more effectively during South Africa's soul-numbing electrical power cuts. Sometimes we go days without electricity or water or phone lines. Crime is an increasing problem.

In addition to the medical filing, we also have some interesting Human Rights legal cases to get to the High Court and need substantial pro bono legal help from people qualified in South African law, because of the complex nature of the challenges. The first requirement is a passionate compassionate super-bright graduate (preferably two) who ideally has worked on children's human rights and children's medico-legal matters before. They'd need to be thorough. The adversaries in some cases have significant financial muscle and will not play fair in avoiding being held accountable for wrongdoing.

If anyone reading this, would really like to help, it is not for the faint-hearted but it will change damaged lives for the better. If, alternatively, you could donate once-off or monthly, that would be welcome.

The biggest obstacle that our children face is ultimately not the disability that may be linked to their injuries or the disfigurement from uneven or distorted features, but it is the reaction that they experience from you, the public.

Do not pity them, do not shun them, do not stare. They are wonderful human beings too.

Follow Children of Fire on:


This is the website of the sister charities:
Children of Fire International
(registered in England and Wales, Number 1088785) and
Children of Fire
(registered in South Africa, Number IT121180/98).

The charities co-operate to help young survivors of burn injuries (whether by fire, chemicals, electricity or hot liquids) in Africa and to help and educate the communities in which they live, providing both prevention and cure. Some aspects of the Johannesburg School for Blind, Low Vision and Multiple Disability Children are also covered here as the GDE-registered school provides tuition for burned children awaiting surgery.

Contact Nelson Tshabalala for details.
58 Auckland Avenue, Auckland Park 2092, Gauteng Province, South Africa
Tel: 011 482 4258 (international dialling +27 11 482 4258)


MAIN charity email address: firechildren@icon.co.za

United Kingdom.
53 Rickmansworth Road, Pinner, Middlesex HA5 3TJ
Tel: 077 11 02 3116 The landline will change in September 2023 and the UK base is expected to relocate to Manu House, Murrayfield, Castletown, Thurso KW14 8TY, Caithness, Scotland where further registration will take place in due course


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This material is Copyright © The Dorah Mokoena Charitable Trust and/or Children of Fire , 1998-2024.
Distribution or re-transmission of this material, excluding the Schools' Guide, is expressly forbidden without prior permission of the Trust.
For further information, email firechildren@icon.co.za