Niki and Rob Mason were living in Dubai when they felt God’s call to come back to South Africa to work with orphaned and vulnerable children in 2016. Seven years later, on 2 May, Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV) Cape Town opened its doors to the vulnerable children of Fisantekraal township in Cape Town, bringing this dream to life.
“I sat before the Lord with all the things I felt in my heart, and told him I really wanted to start with the littles ones,” says Niki Mason, cofounder of LIV Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families. Niki felt God saying that he was the one that put that desire in her heart in the first place, she says. VIDEO: Jess Holing
“Tannie Niki, Tannie Niki!”
The voice of one child soon morphs indistinguishably into a chorus of 20 children’s voices as they run towards the familiar face spotted in the doorway of the class they’ve just been let out of.
Without hesitation, Niki Mason, cofounder of Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV) Cape Town, opens her arms. It is obvious that this particular routine has happened multiple times before. Within seconds, her previously empty arms are filled with flailing limbs, innocent smiles and doting faces looking up at her.
“Hello my kinders [my children],” she laughs, eyes darting from face to face just quickly enough to look every child in the eye before they run off, but slow enough to make each one feel like she really wanted to look at them.
“For years, I had the perception that if you work for the Lord, it needs to be really hard. It needs to be difficult to get up every day,” says Niki Mason, founder of Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV) Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families. “But I’ve realised it’s okay to do that thing that’s really in your heart,” she says. Mason always knew she wanted to work with vulnerable children, she says. PHOTOS: Jess Holing
Building homes, building futures
The heart of Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV), translating to ‘The Right Way’, was always to support orphaned and vulnerable children, says Niki’s husband Rob Mason, non-executive director at LIV Cape Town and senior originator in debt capital markets at Standard Chartered Bank.
The beginnings of LIV are stitched into the heart of its founder, Tich Smith, who had a vision in 1997 to build a village where orphaned and vulnerable children would be placed in a home with a loving mother, food on the table, a good education and ultimately, the opportunity to get to know God as their father, Niki says.
With this in mind, LIV’s mission is to rescue children from harmful home environments, restore their lives, equip them to be leaders and release them into the world with the necessary skills and values to reach their full potential, she says.
The flagship village based in Durban was built in 2011, however the heart of LIV has infiltrated into the whole country, Niki says. There are currently five other villages at different stages of development in Langkloof, Lanseria, Lukhanyiso, Thokomala and now Cape Town, she says.
“None of the villages are competing, we all just respond to needs in our areas. You can’t start something if there’s no need for it,” she says, explaining that the leaders of all the villages meet once every two weeks online and twice a year in person.
Kayde “Zanele” Kadyeremwana, who spent 8 years at LIV Durban with her younger brother, currently studies social work at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Living in the village can bring up painful memories for some children that start to question why they were abandoned, she says. However the mentorship she experienced in the village and the purpose she found in mentoring younger children has stayed with her after leaving the village, Kadyeremwana says.
“‘I’m still in touch with my foster mother and most of my friends from the village,” she says.
Niki Mason’s love for nutrition has been expressed through the vegetable garden at LIV Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families. A six-hundred square metre area of the village is dedicated to growing organic fruit and vegetables, where the children are involved in the process too, she says. PHOTOS: Jess Holing
The LIV Cape Town vision
LIV Cape Town, located in the Fisantekraal township in Cape Town, focuses specifically on the early childhood development of 80 Afrikaans and IsiXhosa-speaking vulnerable children, aged 3 to 5, by preparing them for primary school through quality education and development, Niki says. The children are prepared through basic mathematics, literacy, arts and crafts and fine and gross motor development, she says.
“However, education is actually only a small part of what we do here,” Niki says. “Most of our kids have either experienced or witnessed abuse in some form,” she says, explaining that the children have been exposed to hearing gunshots regularly at night and seeing dead bodies on the road.
“Education is a vehicle to love on these children and bring some restoration and healing to them,” she says.
Unlike at LIV Durban where the children also live in the village, these children go home each evening, however they spend most of their day at LIV and are fed four times daily, Niki says. As many of the families in this community rely on small South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) grants, this is vital for their children’s development.
“We know when they leave here in the evenings, if they don’t get food at home, it’s fine, because they’ll be back tomorrow and we can feed them then,” she says.
The children at LIV Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families, are given protein, fruit and vegetables in at least two of the four meals they eat daily, says Niki Mason, cofounder of LIV Cape Town. This past year, LIV villages nationwide provided 4983 people with food each week, with 11454 total beneficiaries through LIV across the country, according to LIV’s website. PHOTOS: Jess Holing
“If you go back to the vision the Lord gave Tich, it speaks not only to looking after vulnerable and orphaned children, but also to caring for our local communities. We’re living out the whole of that vision at LIV Cape Town,” says Rob.
“Of the 15 staff members we’ve got, 12 were previously unemployed for 3 years or more. We’ve been able to create opportunities for parents of our children in the community. It’s a core part of our vision to provide holistic support for the families of the children we care for,” he says.
When Phamela Palese first came to the newly opened LIV in her community, she was looking for a school for her 5-year-old child, who is now enrolled at LIV. After giving her CV to Niki,
Palese got a job there as a cleaner, she says.
“I thank God, because at home, no one was working at that time, not even my husband,” she says.
Fatherlessness is also a persistent problem in the Fisantekraal community, Niki says. “About 40 to 50% of our children don’t have a father listed on their application form,” she says. “It’s as big a problem as everyone says it is.”
“I thank God for Niki,” says Pamela Palese, who is employed at LIV Cape Town as a cleaner. Before this job, neither Palese nor her husband were employed, but needed to look after their child, she says. Now she is employed and her child attends LIV Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families.The original vision of LIV was always to care for our local communities too, says Robs Mason, non-executive founder of LIV Cape Town. PHOTOS: Jess Holing
‘I always knew’
Around a breakfast table where no food was eaten and a whole toilet paper roll was used to wipe away tears, Tich and his wife Joan shared their vision for LIV with Niki and Rob in 2016, sparking the flame that had been flickering in Niki’s heart ever since she was young.
A true farm girl at heart, Niki grew up on a farm in the Western Cape where she always played with the children of the coloured community. “I always knew in my heart I wanted to work with vulnerable children,” she says, but just before her 21st birthday, she moved to England to work as an actuary, where she met her husband, she says. After marrying and having children, the family was relocated to both Singapore and Dubai for Rob’s work.
“When we were living in Dubai, Tich came through to visit our church. Hearing about his heart for vulnerable children, we asked him to go for coffee with us, and he ended up spending the whole morning with us, sharing his vision,” Rob says.
“It resonated with us so much – it became a life-defining moment,” Rob says. It was the first time that someone else was already doing what God had been calling us to do too, he says.
“From that moment onwards, we didn’t look back,” Rob says. The couple experienced a confirmation of this calling through repetitive dreams about various forms of transport, signifying their journey into ministry, while Niki consistently dreamt about missing a flight, he says.
So, when Niki was given a prophecy a few months later that she would not miss her flight, and that God was preparing something for her, the couple knew it was time to move back to South Africa to start working with vulnerable children, Niki says.
However, this was not a journey without significant roadblocks, Rob says. “There were many times when we were 24 hours away from running out of money, and then the day before the payment, the money would just arrive, Rob says, explaining that God provided financially for their dream through donors, sponsorships and community support throughout.
“If God is in something, no setback is ever final,” he says.
After being donated 16 computers, a computer literacy centre is now being built in the village, as well as vegetable gardens as a sustainable source of food and a second-hand clothing shop. Niki also has dreams of starting a safe house for people rescued from human trafficking.
“We want this to be a place where these kids can get the best shot in life possible,” Niki says.
There is a huge need for Grade R schools where children can go after they leave LIV at five years old, says Niki Mason, cofounder of LIV Cape Town, an early childhood development centre bridging the educational inequality gap by providing quality education and holistic care for vulnerable children and their families. “There is a phenomenal school still in this community, but they can only take 160 children. Of the forty children leaving us this year, only about 12 of them are going to this school, Niki says. “Where are the others going?” she says, explaining that the need in the Fisantekraal community outweighs the capacity to educate these children. PHOTOS: Jess Holing