Hotel kicks off festival for community

KNYSNA NEWS - This coming Saturday, 1 July, Issaquena Heights Boutique Hotel will be hosting a community awareness kick-off event as part of the Knysna Oyster Festival.

The event is aimed at children aged four to 17 years as a way of educating and providing them with fun activities. The community programme will include a literacy and numeracy educational activity for the little ones aged four to six.

For youth aged 10 to 17 and their parents, there will be a community awareness forum for which the topic will only be made known on the day.

There will also be fun activities for the youth. Refreshments will be available for the event participants.

Issaquena Heights Boutique Hotel is owned by Otis Rounds, a native of Issaquena County, Mississippi in the US.

As a frequent traveller to South Africa, Rounds would find himself increasingly in love with the Garden Route and all of its natural beauty.

An Issaquena Welcome. The boutique hotel is not only a hospitality hub but a business that aims to open its doors to help the community.

Each of his travels to Knysna was focused on procuring a hospitality venue, until he found what he was looking for in 2022: the formerly known Madison Manor.

Rounds acquired the Manor together with his family and turned it into the current Issaquena Heights Boutique Hotel.

Philanthropy has always been at the core of Rounds' work. He has been involved in the Committee for South African Solidarity (Cosas), a California Bay Area South African organisation that helped him spearhead an educational drive to provide books and school supplies to Rheenendal Primary School.

"As I am sure many natives to this area know, the different faces of Knysna's locations reflect different qualities of life," he says.

"The situation in a few rural and underdeveloped areas here are not unlike dilapidation and dereliction I have seen across the US in both its major cities and its rural towns. Thus, while I am in Knysna, as while in the US, I wish to continue to do my share to dispel hunger and neglect of the elderly, steer our youth towards paths of meaningful citizenship as adults, and engage in the community in other ways when given the opportunity, where I deem I may walk shoulder to shoulder with other community proponents."

Rounds, along with Elrico April, Banele Manu and other community advocates, has formed Knysna Communities Coming Together (KCCT) and the community awareness programme will be one of its many outreach programmes.

A few of the youngsters who have been helped by the Issaquena Heights community initiatives.