New Goals
Not Just Schools
The work of Joshua goes forward and we have many more projects that need your support and help. Below is a list of many of the things that we still need to achieve to provide our goal of a safe and secure living environment for orphans and to develop the necessary life skills for them to become full members of their communities.
- Boreholes to provide water for villages. (£6,000)
- Solar Panels to provide electricity for the clinic/classrooms (£6,000)
- More classrooms for remote villages (£8,000 per double-room classroom)
- Feeding stations (£8,000)
- Staff housing to provide full-time accommodation to the clinic's nurses and doctors. (£20,000 per house (2 needed))
- A basic two-roomed building for the guardians. These are women who accompany the pregnant women to the clinic and stay with them to care for them and then take them home afterwards. (£6,000 per shelter)
- A bicycle ambulance (£200)
- A maize mill to help provide income for local communities (£2,000)and fruit trees.
Updates
Continuing Challenges
The price of food has shot up recently - the harvest has been spoilt by unusually heavy rains, and maize has been diverted into biofuel programmes. Hence Joshua’s help has been particularly valued.
Water projects have moved ahead significantly: The new borehole at Kachumbe, a gift from Croydon Whitgift Rotarians, is producing pure water and saves a walk of over 2 km. Explorations continue at Manyenje and Mwandika for borehole sites, and we hope to go ahead with water harvesting at our new clinic.
The Education programme continues to make steady progress. We have identified villages where children are taught in the open (difficult in the rainy season!) and will be building as soon as sites are obtained. A Science Lab and a Library are being built for the Secondary School at Pensulo. We now have about 300 youngsters studying there. Over a hundred of these are sponsored using your donations. Promising students are being sponsored in Further Education. For the time being our schools depend almost wholly on Joshua for their resources, although we are negotiating with the Ministry of Education to provide more trained teachers and to provide materials. Houses are needed for our schools to attract better trained and qualified staff.
Working with Volunteers
Joshua continues to benefit from the partnership with professional volunteering organisation providers, Quest Overseas. Three groups of volunteers visited in 2007, living in some of our village communities and working with them to improve their facilities.
Quest was invited to visit the Joshua Orphan Care Trust in 2005. Since then over 60 GAP volunteers and 5 Sabbatical volunteers have worked together with the Trust, its voluntary staff and the communities to improve the lives of orphans in the locality. Quest volunteers have to date donated over £60,000 to assist Joshua in it's work. These groups of highly motivated and energetic youngsters provide an enormous stimulus to the local villagers, and for their part the volunteers learn a great deal by experiencing a different culture and lifestyle at first hand
Through Quest, we have also welcomed our first Corporate Group that came from the Royal Bank of Scotland. Two teams came to stay in Pensulo Village and built a maternity clinic. Everyone is very excited and grateful to Quest and the RBS and all the donors involved.
Achievements between Joshua and Quest's volunteer teams (2005-2008):
- Built a maternity clinic to serve over 40,000 people from the Pen Sulo community;
- Constructed 3 two-room classrooms;
- Plastered, painted and constructed the floor, doors and windows of two run-down classrooms;
- Renovated two small community owned businesses (sewing centre and bakery) and funded business and accountancy training for co-operative owners;
- Sponsored 61 children through 5 years of secondary education;
- Co-ordinated a large HIV Awareness Day for local community, national TV, radio and government officials;
- Organised several tree planting days with members of the local schools;
- Designed and painted several murals for a community educational resource centre;
- Constructed an outdoor ‘play centre’ for the Pen Sulo community orphans.