Thanks for the pants!

Many thanks to all those people, mostly staff (past and present) of Ashburton Community School who donated underwear for us to give out. Here you can see some of last year's nursery class looking happy with their new gear!

Building infrastructure

Our building work continues! Construction of a kitchen with big wood burning pots is already underway thanks to the generosity of the girls from Sacred Heart School in Hammersmith, who between them raised an amazing amount of money to make this possible! With our aim of helping the whole community, all the bricks were made by the local committee members and many local people will be employed to assist with the construction. The pictures show the site being measured and one of the kilns used for baking the bricks.

Once the kitchen is complete, two more toilets will be added behind the school to cater for the increasing number of older children and adults we are helping at the centre.

A long, hot summer in Chilubula!

We arrived in Chilubula very excited to see what progress had been made since our last visit, and we were not disappointed. The first big thing we noticed was the activity around the bore hole and the lush vegetation showing over the fence from the new garden adjacent to the bore hole. The garden is already producing plenty of tomatoes, cabbages and cucumbers, and the bananas will fruit within the next year for the first time. The close proximity of the bore hole has enabled this garden to prosper. The bore hole is used heavily by a lot of the community and has meant that they now have access to safe drinking water. We can confirm that the water is totally clear and tastes OK!

On our second day lots of people starting arriving early, and we initially thought that they had come for casual work, but it turned out they were waiting for their adult literacy class to start. Two groups have been set up in response to requests from the community; Charlie's sister Eunice takes the beginners class and his brother-in-law Leonard takes the slightly more advanced group. It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm with which the groups attacked their studies;such a desire to learn and better themselves. The majority of the classes were made up of women who had been denied an education earlier in life. They came with their small notebooks and pencils and often with their babies on their backs.

A large part of our time was spent organising the Sports Day. Last year about 500 people had turned out for the day, so we were anticipating that we would probably get more this year, perhaps 750. How wrong we were! They just kept coming and coming! We estimated about 1000 members of the community attended. All received free drinks and buns and had a thoroughly unique experience, something totally different. Event winners won prizes ranging from candles to soap to cooking oil to dried fish.