Precious Little has begun...
On Friday, October 26, we visited Mangamba School in South Eastern Tanzania.
Contact was made through a UK NGO called Breakfast Club. They do a marvellous job in providing breakfast to the kids at Mangamba to encourage attendance and to aid concentration.
The school is set in the rolling hills behind Mtwara. The area is inhabited mostly by the Makonde people, the majority of whom are subsistence farmers. In the school grounds, guinea fowl peck under mango trees and from the road nearby you can glimpse the Indian Ocean. In many ways it's an idyllic setting, but its far from paradise. HIV and malaria are big problems here, and Mtwara region is one of the poorest and most remote in the country.
There are about 250 kids at the school. We asked 30 of them to draw their best friends, their families and their home. They took the task very seriously and drew with painstaking care.
The drawings we collected, along with those from a Maasai school in Kenya and an as-yet-undetermined school in South Africa, will be sold as part of the Precious Little Exhibition in Sydney next year.
At Mangamba, the proceeds from the exhibition will be controlled by Breakfast Club - they plan to buy a cow for the school so that breakfast programme can be more self-sufficient. There are also some classrooms that don't have flooring, and some without desks, so perhaps the money can help with that.
Thanks to Romy and Katy for setting it up, and thanks to everyone who has already promised to bring themselves and their wallets to the Precious Little Exhibition.
Next stop, Rombo, Kenya.
Please post comments!
Love
Nick and Leonie
1 comment:
Hi Precious Little,
Katy sent me the details of your project,what a fantastic idea! It has so many positives: from the children enjoying doing the drawings, to people who enjoy looking at the drawings in their homes to the children reaping the benefits of the money raised from the drawings!Wow so simple aswell.
I'm glad your visist to Mangamba went well. The Breakfast Club team, both in the UK and in Tanzania, has put loads of effort into ensuring everything was done correctly. And i'm proud to say that the hard work has paid off as the success of the project is so visible in the children's behaviour and well being. It is great to think we could have another school benefiting from porridge and fruit everyday in the very near future...
All the very best of luck with Precious Little.
Anna - Breakfast Club Tanzania Trustee
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