Fundraiser nets $4,600 for village

When a community pulls together, one night can make a huge difference in the lives of people in need from another part of the world.

So it was with the Ndebele Art Project — a nonprofit organization formed by a group of eight local women to help the Jabulani people in a small village in Zimbabwe — which held its first fundraiser at Aire restaurant at the Camp in Costa Mesa on March 11.

The restaurant was sold out, and customers were able to learn more about the plight of the Ndebele people as a video of the women’s trip to Victoria Falls in November was screened on a wall throughout the evening.

The group began its work following a 2003 visit to the village in Zimbabwe by Jennifer Kemper and her mother, Sandy Orrill, both of Newport Beach.

Since then, the group has established a preschool with two teachers and 40 students in 2004, and the group underwrites loans and grants for the villagers so they can educate themselves and find jobs.

The project’s most important accomplishment to date has been to bring water to the Jabulani village, by hiring a contractor to install a windmill and six water tanks to replace the 30-year-old borehole where women pumped their own water, walking miles to and from the village with buckets on their heads and babies on their backs.

The fundraiser at Aire restaurant raised $4,600, enabling the nonprofit group to send final payment on the water project to the contractor in Zimbabwe.

“People can only go so long without food and water, the basic necessities,” said Richard Orrill, Sandy Orrill’s husband and Kemper’s father. The Jabulani people “want what we all want — happiness, healthy kids, a good education — everybody wants that.”

In the language of the Ndebele people, “jabulani” means joy, according to Kemper and her mother.

And the 500 men, women and children living in the small Jabulani village in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe — a population that is 80% unemployed, surviving without running water or electricity, and fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis — are joyful people.

They break out into song and dance at a moment’s notice, Kemper said. They have names like Happiness, Admirer, Patience, Honest, Both Well and Calypso. They are husbands, wives, grandparents and children.

And they don’t want charity — they want to learn how to help themselves.

The group would like to restore the run-down building that houses a preschool, install more windmills so water can be brought directly to the preschool, and establish a health clinic in the village.

Their long, long-term goal is to once again have tribal artisans carving giraffes out of local wood — a lost art that was their livelihood until a few years ago.

For more information about the Ndebele Art Project, go to www.napafrica.org.