Nuns to renovate school for use as skills, job center - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 12, 2001 by Gill Donovan

SOUTH AFRICA: Notre Dame Sisters in an impoverished area of South Africa will renovate an abandoned whites-only boarding school to teach skills and create jobs.

When local government officials realized the four-story building, once a girls' boarding school run by the nuns in Kroonstad, was "too expensive even to knock down, never mind to renovate," they asked the nuns to take it back and use it for job creation projects, said U.S. Notre Dame Sr. Mary Margaret Pignone in a late-September telephone interview from Kroonstad.

The limited funds the nuns have to start the program will pay for a roof to be put on the building, and that work will start in January, Pignone said.

People who sign up for the program will learn building and other skills in the process, she said.

"But there's no point in teaching people skills where there are no jobs for them to go to when they have finished learning," said Pignone, noting that the program will focus on creating jobs and small businesses.

Pignone, who is coordinating the skills training and job creation program, came to South Africa in 1999 from the United States, where she was an administrator of her order in the Chesapeake province.

The program will target jobless people in the northern part of Free State province, especially the newly constituted Moqhaka municipality, which includes Kroonstad and its surrounding townships and rural areas.

The Free State is one of South Africa's poorest provinces.