Mphatikizo Thursday 27th July 2017

The team in the completed school and first day of lessons.

. As I said earlier the group were also involved in an out reach programme targeting young girls and early marriage which is a huge problem here in Malawi and our local area. This programme was run in partnership with the local primary school and a mothers group who have already set up a feeding centre and fishponds to help assist the poorer families in the community. This mothers group selected two young girls from each village who had either dropped out of school due to early marriage and children, or who were in a vulnerable position with high chance of early marriage. Each day of the programme a different pair of New Zealanders would travel to a community, meet with the girls and discuss each other’s life and the difficulties each one faced. This programme was a huge success both empowering for the young African woman involved and a

[endif]--wonderful experience for the volunteers. This is very much in line with Mphatikizos mission, connecting New Zealanders with Malawians at a grassroots level.

The benefit for both young New Zealanders and Africans is immeasurable. The only mistake we made with this programme was not allocating enough time and for the next group we will allocate more of our time to out reach programmes such as this. The group returned to Christchurch and the rain last week and are very much missed here. A huge thank you to Jess, Abi, Pippa, Megan, Jess, Claire, Richard, Aiden, Dunstan, and all the community volunteers for your work. We hope to see you return in the not too distant future.

At the Orphanage things continue to move along with all the Kitchen furniture and cupboards completed and once funding permits we will begin to put in shelving for the storeroom and build lockers to hold each child’s personal belongings. We still however need funding for the rest of the Solar system, gas bottle and fridge. We continue to make good progress on our Certification which to date has been a long and frustrating process. We are however with the help of many people here, making progress and all our inspections from the various health and child welfare departments have been done. On Monday we have our final inspection from Machinga Office and we have been told by Tuesday we will have the certificate to open. Regina has begun to organize the Opening with all the necessary phone calls and we did laugh on talking to some of the chiefs that this planning for the opening had begun in 2011 !! It has been a very long road but as they say well worth the journey.

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