Happy Children

We are now about to start our final day here at Ndola, in the heart of the Copperbelt area of Zambia, tomorrow we fly south the Livingstone and start a drive around the south and the game areas. Before that we would like to reflect a little on our thoughts of this area, the people and the work being done by the fantastic team of Beyond Ourselves in helping the communities to improve lives and education in some extremely deprived locations.

Families near Kitwe

A Family from Kawama

Beyond Ourselves work in 3 schools, Janna School here in Ndola and two in Kitwe, Kawama and Greater Joy schools, both about an hours drive north from Kitwe. We both have visited all three, and helped in the schools.

The most amazing thing that you cannot fail to notice is the children, around 900 attend the schools and all are so happy, laughing and wanting to follow you everywhere when not in class. In reality many have little  as they are often so poor. Beyond Ourselves provides clothes, shoes and for many the only hot meal of the day as all children are fed a midday meal in school.

Preparing the meat for today's dinners

Jan stirring Nshima, a staple part of the diet here in Zambia

Queue for dinner

Jan spent a lot of the time looking at the teaching and leadership within the schools while I was more involved with the infrastructure and the ongoing problems of some of the older buildings as well as looking at new projects within the schools and also income generating activities within the local communities.

Glazing windows in the "New" Staff room

We have a meeting early this morning with the team here and the outcome will decide if they would like to work with us and we become part of the team here and also for us to decide if Ndola and the area here is where we would like to live and work for a year or longer starting in the middle of 2015.

We now have to make that choice.