Tag Archive : Suzanne Van Arsdall

Via the Frankfort State Journal

by Keren Henderson

When Suzanne Van Arsdall drags her tired body from bed at 5 a.m. to run several miles before school starts, she pictures the children she met in South Africa.

“And then I have the energy to do it,” says the 17-year-old from Frankfort. “I’m running for a purpose.”

Suzanne is running the Kentucky Derby Festival Marathon April 30 to raise $11,000 for a safe house for women and children in a South African township that claims one of the highest rates of domestic violence, rape and abuse in the world.

“It’s a pretty high goal,” says Suzanne, who currently has $4,000 in pledges. “But that’s how much it costs.”

Suzanne volunteered last summer for the small charity called Philisa Abafazi Bethu (which means “heal our women”) in Lavender Hill, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. The high school senior worked mostly with 100 girls, all survivors of rape and abuse, in the after-school program.

The current safe house is actually a wooden shack in the backyard of Lucinda Evans, the local woman who started Philisa Abafazi in 2008. It holds four people for up to 72 hours. As the only safe house in Lavender Hill, it’s always full, and Lucinda regularly sends victims away.

“I have women sitting in the road on a Monday morning waiting to be seen, and every time it tears my heart in pieces,” Lucinda says in an email from her home in Lavender Hill.

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