Forty women will spend a morning at Daybreak House choosing leather, playing with colour, and making a handbag that looks like nothing anyone else owns. The event is called Kleur die Lig In. They will drink good coffee. Someone will bring bubbly. There will be a great deal of laughing, and at some point someone will hold up two pieces of leather that should not work together and discover that they do.
At the end of it, once the leather and the materials and the Alsuli team have been paid for, what remains will cover roughly one day of running Daybreak House.
One day.
I want to be honest about how that sounded to me the first time I worked it out. All of that effort, all of that planning, forty people giving up a Thursday morning, and the result is a single day on a calendar with 365 of them.
But then I thought about what one day actually holds.
One day is every bottle prepared and warmed and tested against the inside of a wrist. It is nappies changed, laundry washed, small bodies bathed and dried and dressed. It is a house parent awake at two in the morning with a baby who cannot settle, walking the passage, not because it is her shift but because the baby needs holding. It is medication given on time. It is a social worker on the phone. It is the electricity that runs the sterilisers, the water that fills the bath, and the formula that fills the bottles.
One day is a day that a baby who had nowhere to go was safe, and known, and loved.
That is not nothing. That is the whole thing, actually, repeated over and over until it becomes a childhood.
This is the part of running a Place of Safety that people do not always see. The need does not arrive in dramatic moments that make good photographs. It arrives every single morning, quietly, in the form of another day that has to be paid for. There is no month where the babies need less. There is no season where we can ease off. Every one of those 365 days costs something, and every one of them has to be covered.
So we look for ways to keep going.
This one began at a friend’s birthday, which is not where most fundraising strategies begin. Suliztha met Alicia Swart there, the founder of Alsuli Creative, and they got talking. Alicia works with leather and colour, and she has spent years thinking about what it means to walk in your own colour in a world that quietly rewards blending in. It became clear fairly quickly that there was something here beyond a donation.
Because the money matters, but it is not the only thing we needed.
Forty women will walk through our gate on 10 September. Most of them will be coming for the handbag, and that is completely fine. But they will leave knowing that Daybreak House exists, that there are babies in Pretoria who need somewhere safe while the adults sort out what happens next, and that a place like this runs on people who decide to show up.
Some of them will forget about us by October. Some of them will not. Some will tell a friend. Some will come back as volunteers, or send nappies, or remember us at the end of a tax year. That is how this works, in our experience. The people who eventually carry you are almost always people who walked in for something else entirely.
So yes, this is a fundraiser, and the proceeds will buy us a day. But it is also forty new people who know our name, and that has a value we cannot put on a spreadsheet.
If you would like to join us, the morning runs from 09:00 to 12:30 on Thursday 10 September in the Daybreak House garden. You will design your own genuine leather handbag, hear Alicia speak about colour and individuality, and have coffee and a Danish pastry on arrival. Spaces are limited to forty, deliberately, because we want it to feel like a morning among friends rather than an event.
Come for the handbag. Stay for whatever comes after.
Book your seat at daybreakhouse.co.za/kleur-die-lig-in
