The Ntimbanjayo Memorial School of Excellence is now open for the sponsored children. Most of the children arrived on Friday and the rest will be collected from their villages over the weekend. Initially Malaika Millinga Ndakidemi will be the main teacher in the classroom. The sponsored children must be very excited at seeing the school for the first time and moving into their bedrooms in the nearby house which will be their dormitory. All children will know at least one other child already as the children were chosen in groups of two or three from each village and this will help them to feel at home.

While these first 20 children settle in, the headmaster Baraka Ndakidemi will be completing the administration of the application forms for local children whose parents want to send them to the school. At the moment most of the parents would like their children to board but they may have to begin as day pupils while we build the dormitory block. The making of bricks for the building of a girls’ and a boys’ dormitory is the focus for the next phase of the school project and we would hope to have the double block with toilets attached completed by the time of the next school intake in January 2012. We have enough funds in hand to start brick making and building,  and will order another load of roof tiles from Magima but the finishing and building of bunk beds and the showers and toilets will be dependant on the new funds we hope to raise from the Art auction planned for October.

The more observant of readers will notice some stubtle changes to this website and blog. These are all thanks to  a Duncan of Jordanstone post graduate student called Yuankai Wu who has been working very hard to improve the functioning and look of the site. He has changed various aspects of the site including the way photographs are displayed on the gallery page and is helping to redesign the sponsorhip and about us pages. He  has added a useful plug in to get rid of spam and is helping Louise to add an archive of all the Newsletters. We plan to have a donate button activated and have opened a paypal account to facilitate this. We also hope to be able to place videos clips on You Tube with links to the site and will eventually have clips from 2007, 2009 and 2010 and Alice and Louise are both thinking about buying their own video camera to take this year, so they can tape the children studying at the school. In addition to doing all this work on the website Yuankai has designed a logo or badge for the school inspired by the Uhuru torch which commemorates Tanzania’s independence and symbolises progress,  light, hope and freedom.