Dear friends and supporters,
A big thank you to all who have supported and continue to support this project of ours, which is advancing in small steps!
Donations, especially this Christmas season, have been very generous and I would like to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart, also on behalf of the children of Maison Msaada! Thanks to your contributions, we are able to meet the expenses
additional due to the situation of the roads, which are now swamped by mud,
and the tripled prices of basic goods, including food. In addition, transporting goods from Bukavu is very expensive and is done almost exclusively by motorcycle because trucks can no longer get there.
Fortunately for us, we had stocked up abundantly on the less perishable products, but they will not be enough until the end of the rainy season, which will last for a few more months.
Thanks to your help we were able to recruit a seamstress and complete the purchase of materials needed for the sewing workshop for our children
,
but also for older and vulnerable women. Currently, we have recruited 11 girls, mostly very young mothers who became pregnant at the age of 15-16 and, therefore, were forced to drop out of school, if they had not stopped their studies earlier due to lack of means. All of them live with their widowed mothers and numerous siblings; none of them knows the whereabouts of the child’s father, who probably fled to work in one of the mines in the region.
A first workshop for these girls will start as early as next week, while classes for our children have already started several weeks ago.
The children are doing well, attending school, and we are looking for additional help with after-school support for older children who could not read or write.
We celebrated a simple Christmas, but it was a good one, despite the rain. With enormous enthusiasm, they made a nativity scene with straw, wood and palm leaves, and decorations with paper they colored and cut out, using very simple means!
Unfortunately, however, the rehabilitation of some children (street children) is not easy and is not a linear path. Although they have all made tremendous progress, we face daily challenges: it is especially difficult to make them abide by some basic rules for community life, coming from backgrounds of great freedom and unruliness.
If we have the necessary means, we also plan to set up a carpentry workshop in the coming months and rent land to be able to produce our own food
and sell some products such as cassava flour, so that we can support labor costs and, in time, rent costs as well. The fields we have now cannot meet our needs (there are too many mouths to feed!), but we have already harvested some sweet potatoes, corn and beans.
Best regards from Mwenga
Ilaria and our collaborators
