Thursday 12 April 2012

Movement in 2012

Since the last time we wrote, we have been living in a situation of hurry up and wait!  What with all the incredible donations we have received, we have had to move offices!  We are now based in a lovely office in Kambanji where we have office space and a whole garage to store our goodies ranging from a tv and a kitchen sink to 97 boxes of corn flackes.  It is definitely HIGH time we get ourselves a school that the children can start making use of all of these things that have so generously been bestowed upon us. 

However, our accountability lies just as much with our donors as it does with our beneficiares and thus, we have been very specific about the piece of land on which we build our first school – it needs to belong to us or at least have a long term lease on it so that we can ensure that the school is a sustainable and ongoing entity and that it is not going to be closed down in the next few months or years.

In the meantime, we have been working towards getting everything set up so that once we have found our ‘spot’, we can get going.  We are working with the Children’s Resource Insititute of Zimbabwe (CRIZ) to get teachers trained and they have offered us two professional trainers to come in and work with our teachers so that they are ready to go as soon as the children enter the classroom.  We do not necessarily need a classroom to begin the school and once we have a piece of land with even a tree on it, we will be able to offer the children a place to come every day to be taught, to be fed and, most importantly, to be loved.

We have been working on our funds and have had a couple of events lately.  We had a fantastic ‘Spread the love this Valentine’s Day’ dinner at which we had 40 guests and were incredibly well supported by our donors who gave food, drinks and live entertainment to provide our guests with a fun evening.  

Our live music created a great atmosphere for chatting earlier and  a bit of dancing as the evening got going!

Charlotte and Martha welcoming and thanking the guests for joining us

Our guests enjoyed an evening of delicious food and wine all donated by our amazing sponsors



Various supporters held their own little dinners at which they made others aware of our work and also managed to get some financial donations made to the project.  Thank you to those of you who held your own dinner and to anyone else who might like to do something like this for us, please get in touch and we can give you some ideas for a fun, CHEAP evening in which you can raise some money for us!

Upcoming events include a Saturday afternoon in our beautiful office garden painting and putting back together the donations that we have received that are a little broken and in disrepair.  We are looking to organise a fun run asap so for those of you who would like to ‘run for a reason’, we will keep you updated!  We will be holding a Sunset Cinema out at Bushmans Rock in Ruwa on 16 June and would love to see as many of you there as possible.  It is the most divine evening under the stars watching a movie on a big screen (like the old drive in!)  If we get it all set up in time, we will bring the kids to the farm on the Friday night for a night of a movie and popcorn and possibly a hot chocolate at that time of year!

I look forward to updating you on our movements next month and hope to have some good news that we will be building!!!