Alice and Louise are back home and Alice is straight back to work. Louise can ease herself in more gradually and has had time to contact all the sponsors and give them individual feedback on their children and to email new photographs of the children wearing their new school uniforms with the school badge. She has also been trying to identify sponsors for the six children whose details were collected this trip. In one of the villages we were introduced to two brothers who are in need of support and a peace corps worker who is based in the village is helping to find sponsors for them. Louise is also looking for sponsors for three girls and two boys and has two friends who are thinking of sponsoring one together. The target is to try and bring the total to 25 children being sponsored in the next few weeks. Louise is  also in the process of  contacting two sponsors whose children have moved to Dar es Salaam and will not be back at Namanditi and to offer them another child to sponsor. Considering the unstable and deprived backgrounds of the children we have selected, to have retained 18 out of the original 20 is probably a pretty good result. We have also added another new child Fidea from Magima village and she has already started at the school.

A sale of Tanzanian gifts is planned for the first week in August and it is hoped that this will raise funds for the building work to send out in September. While in Songea we bought material and got a local fundi (tailor) to make it into trousers and we also bought some jewellery and other interesting pieces. We are running out of funds to send over and have a gap between the end of August and the end of October when the auction money will become available and it is going to be difficult to keep the momentum going on the school building project during September and October. We have left Ntimba in charge of managing the building work and he has several major tasks to complete before the new year; the roof of the admin building is to be covered in Iron sheeting and one of the rooms is to be finished inside for his office, the next two classrooms have to be built with the bricks that are being fired just now and the tiles on the existing building need some modification to ensure they are not porous. The new classroom block will serve as a dormitory and will be fitted out with beds. We are still waiting for the final stage in the registration of the school – all the required documents are in Dar es Salaam. Once the school is registered there will be no shortage of parents wanting to bring their children to the school.

Kim McGillivray, a tutor from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art has fulfilled a life time’s ambition to ride a stage of the tour de France: ‘On Monday I rode my stage of the Tour de France on the Etape du Tour event in the Alps. ‘Took 5 hours 51 minutes which was decent, as was much of the ride, until the final climb up Alpe d’Huez. The temperature was 30c+ by then and so a few breathers were needed. However, the crowds were fantastic and with the amazing landscape made for an intense and unforgettable experience.’ Kim hopes to have raised around £500 for the Namanditi School and we congratulate him on an amazing achievement.