At the end of November Baraka held an open day at the school and invited the families of the sponsored children. Food was prepared for the visitors, many of whom had to travel a considerable distance from remote villages, to reach Namanditi. The day was a great success and visitors were delighted to see the children looking so happy and healthy. The event was a great way to celebrate the graduation of 16 of the older children from Nursery to Level One and also helped to advertise the school to local parents. One of the visitors who is an American Peace Corps worker attended the event and  took the photograph below:

 The children are back in their villages during December but Ntimba and Baraka have been working hard throughout the month to prepare the school for the start of a new school year. There are still a few final steps required to register the school and Baraka will have to make several trips to Dar es Salaam to finalise this process. It is astonishing the extent to which people in Tanzania have to travel backwards and forwards to the capital in order to obtain essential permission to undertake any sort of business. This is clearly a very inefficient system and I am amazed that the Tanzanians’ entreprenurial spirit is not dampened by all the delays caused by everything being centralised in Dar es Salaam.

The roofs have all been completed on the existing buildings and the walls of the new double classroom will be complete by the end of January. It is hoped that the Magima workers will have enough of the new stronger clay tiles fired by then to cover this new roof. It is likely that the interior finishing will take a few months to complete but the classrooms should be finished and in use as dormitories by the time of our next visit. We will be taking an architect’s plan for the layout of the school with us so we can discuss the next building phase with Baraka and Ntimba. There are various options for which building we should focus on next and all of it will depend on our raising more funds in 2012.