On top of the world

MASERU-THE mission for newly launched non-governmental organisation (NGO), Sold Out, is not to change the world.
Rather, the mission, as sketched out by its founder and Managing Director, Itumeleng Ralebitso in an interview last week, is to help groom Basotho youths into confident and competent individuals ready to take on the world.

According to Ralebitso, the organisation seeks to help nurture the talents of local young women and men, inculcating in them a higher sense of self-esteem in readiness for the international stage where only the best make it.
But at only 26 years of age, you would think Ralebitso herself should be queuing up to receive the kind of assistance that Sold Out seeks to provide rather than be the one heading that effort to help.

However, that would be to underestimate the determination of a young woman driven to help others by her own bitter experiences growing up in Lesotho’s poverty-stricken countryside where life is generally tough for everyone and much worse for an orphan such as Ralebitso was.
“All I think about is how can I help the next person,” Ralebitso says, who, if her record so far is anything to go by, looks destined for a much bigger role in the humanitarian and NGO sector in Lesotho and beyond.

Ralebitso, who spoke to thepost this week about her life story, her thoughts and plans going into the future, said her desire both at Sold Out and the other organisations she works with is to put a smile on the faces of children unfortunate to walk the same thorny path she and her five siblings walked, growing up under the care of a single mother after her father abandoned them.
“My father left us when I was only six years old and life was really difficult with my mother working as a hawker trying to (feed) the six of us,” she says, as she narrates the hard and unhappy circumstances of her early life and to which her passion to help others can be traced.

Ralebitso was born in Semonkong, in rural Maseru and when her father deserted the family, they moved to Maseru city to stay with her maternal grandfather in Khubetsoana. They lived in the low-income houses section commonly known as Leh-Corp after the Lesotho Housing Corporation that built the homes.

From Leh-Corp she and her elder sisters would walk two hours every day to get to the Methodist Church-run primary school they attended.
“I remember that we used to walk from Khubetsoana to school daily, whether it was hot or cold, barefootbecause all we wanted to do was to go to school,” she says.
For sure, things were hard for Ralebitso’s family but maybe a little bearable until death struck in the family.

First it was her grandfather to pass away then her mother took ill which meant she couldn’t carry on with her job as an informal fruit seller.
“My mom was unemployed. She was selling fruits at the bus stop. After falling sick she had to stop working and couldn’t afford to pay our school fees anymore,” she says, her voice shaky with emotion and the blink of her eye faster as she fought to keep back the tears.

With their mother unable to pay fees Ralebitso and her siblings could have dropped out of school, but some well-wishers stepped in with the money and they were able to keep going to school.
However, Ralebitso’s eldest sister had to quit school so she could help put food on the table of what by now was virtually a child-headed family. The sister was only 15-years-old when she was forced to quit school.

When their mother’s illness got worse, they left the Methodist school and enrolled at Mejametalana Primary School that is nearer to where they stayed; a move that allowed them more time to tend to their sick mother.

“When she was critically ill, I knew I had to make sure that she bathed, ate and took her medication,” says Ralebitso.
Ralebitso’s mother would eventually pass on in June 2004 succumbing to an illness she had battled for a couple of years.
It was a tragedy that would open a new and, one might say dangerous chapter, in Ralebitso and her siblings’ tortured lives.
Then Ralebitso’s elder sister also a teenager had to drop out of school and moved out to make her own living. She was completely on her own, with no money to go to school or to feed her younger siblings. They survived on food handouts from neighbours and other well-wishers.

“It was quite a mess,” is how Ralebitso described that phase of her life when she says she and her siblings came closest to dropping out of school and leaving home to go join the multitudes of homeless children living on the streets of Maseru.
But the tide would in due course turn for Ralebitso and her siblings when about a year after the death of their mother they were taken in by SOS Children’s Village in Lithabaneng, Maseru.
Needless to say, conditions at the children’s village were far better than what Ralebitso and her siblings had ever experienced. They were able to attend school, with Ralebitso herself enrolling with Leribe English Medium High School in 2007.

Then two years later she was selected as one of the children from Lesotho to go and further their schooling in Ghana at an SOS-run Hermann Gmeiner International College where she did her LGCE and IB Diploma.

The school brings together all children drawn from the organisation’s villages across Africa. She spent eight years in Ghana, returning in 2017 upon which she volunteered with the Relationship Inspiring Social Enterprise (RISE), an organisation which helps young graduates in the build environment on live projects, working as organiser.
She would later be appointed programme coordinator of RISE focusing on teaching and imparting entrepreneurship skills to the youths that the group works with.
Ralebitso has since moved from RISE in December 2018 and joined DHL GoTeach in May this year, a joint initiative between SOS and DHL that helps young people from SOS to be more employable and to be able to start their own businesses.

She is employed as a coordinator with the initiative that besides Lesotho is also present in several other Sub-Saharan African countries.
Ralebitso is also a member of Future of Africa, a Ghanaian-based NGO that works to help street children escape their vulnerable situation.
She introduced the group in Lesotho and undertook some work with street children here but that has been temporarily stopped because of resource constraints.
Besides her work helping the disadvantaged and vulnerable, Ralebitso is also a talented singer who wrote a song for SOS titled, Thank You, that she was asked to perform at the group’s 75th anniversary in Ethiopia in June this year.

She was also asked to perform the song at an SOS event in Germany last year, while the organisation’s global team facilitated her trip to Austria to produce a video of the song.
Ralebitso got recognition worldwide for the song she wrote, which has now been officially adopted as the SOS global song.
Due to this song SOS World launched its first ever arts scholarship competition where Ralebitso was one of the judges.

It is an online competition initiated in Germany, started in June till October and winners will be announced in December. It is now going to be annual.
A confident and educated young woman, it certainly has been a long journey for Ralebitso. Born in poverty in Semonkong, you could at one time have safely bet your last penny that she was destined for life on the streets and much worse.
But the heavens clearly had other plans for her.

’Mamakhooa Rapolaki