The Papillon Foundation

"Creating better tomorrows...from the ashes of today"

Part 1.

The Papillon Foundation was started by myself with nothing, no money and no equipment in 2002. I worked the first year for free and in the second year started to earn a tiny stipend! I used to live in a posh suburb and ran my own office in a prestigious suburb of Johannesburg. One day something happened that I can still not explain. I had a row with my fiancée in 2000 and I simply walked out! Left the car, house, furniture and even my wallet behind! To cut a long story short, I ended up at a church in a poor and high crime suburb and they gave me a space to sleep in their store, on the floor. One day the Reverend came to me, as he knew about my past and he asked me to research and write some community outreach projects.
Well, that was the day that The Papillon Foundation was born. We started with a feeding scheme for the street people. Then all of a sudden, South Africa was flooded by refugees from the war torn African countries and hundreds of refugees settled in our suburb. They could not communicate with the locals, as most of them were French. Many of them were university graduates, doctors, geologists, bankers, dentists, and even some professors. I had a meeting with them and Papillon's English language training project was born. I wrote the project for 20 students, but a few weeks later we had 370 students. The church people started to moan and complain that it was a church and not a school and almost all of the turned against me. They saw the church building as their holy house and here I had all these refugees streaming in for English classes.
I will continue with Part 2.