On Sunday, Scientology Volunteer Ministers of Gauteng broke the mark of 100,000 hours of volunteer work provided to assist South Africans since the President of South Africa announced the lockdown in mid-March 2020. Their volunteer work prioritized the protection of essential services staff and officials, but they also extended their work to vulnerable and everybody else to make people safer through sanitization.
In mid-March, Scientologists, who were about to be blocked to go out like any other churches because of the lockdown, decided to invest their energy and knowledge through helping their fellowmen during one of the worst pandemic the country as seen – not to say the world. They lined up volunteers trained on the Volunteer Minister technology, written by L. Ron Hubbard more than 50 years ago, and educated them on sanitization.
Since, they have established partnerships with more than 55 organizations, in Gauteng alone, from municipalities such as Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, Tshwane and Sedibeng and indiscriminately went to sanitize clinics and government buildings to shelters and thousands of taxis, police cars, ambulances and fire truck at their own cost.
To add to that, the Volunteer Ministers also printed educational material which they translated in Sotho and Zulu to teach people on how to protect themselves and stay well during such time. In total, all this adds to more than a 100,000 hours of voluntary work.
A Regional Director from Johannesburg Municipality wrote the following after receiving the sanitization service from the Volunteer Ministers, “Your selfless contribution has played a vital role in ensuring that our staff can operate in a healthy environment with minimal risk exposure. The work you continue to do in society can find no better expression than in the very motto of your organization, “Something can be done about it”. This is indeed what epitomizes the human spirit and carves a better future for all of us.”
Public Affairs Director for the Volunteer Minister, Sandile Hlayisi said, “This is what we have contributed to so far and we are carrying on, adding more and more people so we can cover more ground in less time.
