Our expedition to this rural part of South Africa’s “Klein Karoo” was motivated by 3 things.  1, we wanted to find out how close to 1^st world civilization we would need to do our work and in this we would establish how much work there was for us, we were shocked to find out that even in rural South Africa, 30 minutes from big towns people had no imagery of themselves or their fathers or their grand fathers or their kids, we were confronted with many remarks such as “if only you were here earlier then I would have had a picture of my husband who died 3 months ago”.  We realized that poverty is the main reason for a lack of imagery, not logistics or accessibility to printers and or towns that can print or frame and that having the means to make an image is no guarantee that poor people will go and create memories for themselves.  This in turn has a snowball effect and imagery becomes a complete void in a society close to modern day civilization, the end result was that we realized that we did not have to travel far into the deepest darkest Africa to find a need for what we are doing, it was right here on our doorstep.  We took 1298 images and framed them and handed them over to the people of Oudtshoorn and surrounds over the 6 days of the event and we made some of the finest memories ever!

We were also selected as one of the charities of the Cape Pioneer Trek and we had 2 cycling teams that represented us and our cause, this gave as huge exposure and I am happy to say that the Memory Foundation Team of Erik Kleinhans and Johnny Kritzinger won the event to there was a lot of “Memory Foundation” on the loudspeaker everyday.  Sad to say that Cape Pioneer Trek decided not to renew us as an “event charity” and we can not continue the work we started there during the event because of lack of funds.

We also with the help and generosity were able to shoot the video that made it possible to start our media / PR launch with the help of Mesa Films and the expert filming work of renowned cameraman Jacques van Tonder, I can not express my appreciation enough to Marisa from Mesa Films who directed and edited the work you see here today and Jacques who was willing to use his own personal equipment and time to do the shoot for us for free, these things normally would cost a lot of money and without the expert help from these kind people none of this would have been possible.  In life there are people who are kind and then people who are not, these two are extremely kind with hearts of gold.  

We did our work and had a hugely positive expedition that ticked a lot of boxes, we make memories, got some publicity and made our video to bring us where we are today, on the verge of success.  I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved this far to make this possible and specially Thomas Henshilwood who has been a friend for as long as I can remember and who has borrowed us his Landy for the shoot and who helped throughout the 6 days with Lara, framing and printing.