A vegetable patch for a school with hungry children, playground equipment for a rural orphanage and 11 brick houses for shack dwellers in Orange Farm feature on a gift list given by girls at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy.
The school's 225 pupils spent their six-day mid-term break participating in OWLAGive - a community service programme in which they collectively gave 3 000 hours of hard work on select projects based on need, funded by the school.
"The programme has always been part of the school's curriculum and is in line with Winfrey's vision of what these girls will eventually mean to South Africa," said Funa Maduka who heads the academy's leadership development programme.
"We see these girls as leaders, and hope they will one day become the kind of big company CEO who will take off on a Sunday and go and work in a soup kitchen."
And so it was that the pupils all volunteered for two or three projects which have been completed over the past six days.
Last week a number of the girls linked with Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe to visit a breast cancer hospice, and intended making 500 pink breast cancer awareness ribbons for local distribution.
"That visit was a wake-up call for many of the girls who did not know much about the illness, and so they decided to rather make 2 000 ribbons," Maduka said.
The girls also visited the Miss Earth SA Foundation to learn about bulbs and seeds before going on to plant trees and a vegetable garden at the Mambo Primary School where the pupils receive three meals a day from a feeding scheme run by the school.
"The spinach and carrots and fruit they planted will all grow to sustain the food programme," said Maduka.
On Saturday the girls left the school before dawn and headed out to Dennilton in Limpopo, where they visited a small orphanage where, according to head Cynthia Nkosi, a playground featured on the wish list of the 100 children in her care.
According to Maduka, the girls assembled playground equipment on the premises, painted it brightly and planted a garden. "One of the kids approached a girl from our school and said: 'One day I want to be just like you. I want to know what you know and do what you do', and that was really special considering that some of our girls are orphans themselves," Maduka said.
Sunday was spent at the Soweto Home of the Aged, where the girls gave manicures to the gogos, played monopoly and cards and then painted a garden mural on the dining room wall.
"It was a brilliant project because it looked really professional with flowers and birds - and a lot of the people who can't even go outside anymore get to see it," Maduka said.
On Monday and Tuesday, the girls headed out to Orange Farm where, under the guidance of Habitat for Humanity, they helped with the building of 11 low-cost houses.
As the sun beat down, the girls mixed cement, laid bricks and toiled on the different building sites.
"This was a special project because some of our girls don't even come from families that live in houses. They know that they have been given a great opportunity, and so they chose this as their way to give back," said Maduka.
Their sojourn ended on Tuesday, with the girls returning to their normal school programme
on Wednesday.
- The trial of Virgina Tiny Makgoba, the woman charged with 13 attacks on girls at the school, resumed in the Sebokeng magistrate's cCourt on Wednesday.
Makgoba stands accused of assaulting a fellow dorm parent as well as 13 other counts relating to physical attacks, sexual assaults and verbal abuse of girls under her care during the time she was employed at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.