Dear Kudimba friends,
It’s time for some Kudimba news again.
Lots of news this time, some of it is very happy news and some of it is very sad.
Austin
Finally – with some delay- we can proudly announce that our star student Austin has been awarded a degree of Bachelor of Science in Public Health. He is now going to do a 6 month internship in another organisation to widen his experiences and turn what he learnt from the school benches into practice.
We hope that Austin’s degree will enable him to assist more vulnerable people in Malawi and to make change possible for them as well.
We are delighted to announce the arrival of Anna Tatendah, born on the 29th of June in Salima, weighing 2900g. She is the baby girl of our Chifundo Sosola. Tatendah is a real Kudimba baby and is already very much loved by her big Kudimba family. We are over the moon. Chifundo is now enjoying some time off with her daughter, she has a few months of maternity leave before she comes back to work at Kudimba.
Chifundo Sosola
Anna Tatendah
Catherine and Shamina
With great sadness we had to say goodbye to our Shamima. We were very hopeful that with the help of Kudimba the fate of this little girl would turn, but it proved to be too difficult. Due to her condition she was too weak and too fragile to gain the strength needed to recover. Shamima passed away on Monday 5th of July. She was two years old.
We shall remember her forever as a part of our Kudimba family. We are grateful to the Kudimba staff members for caring for her and making her short life brighter.
Kudimba supported Shamima’s mother with the costs of the coffin, the funeral and for food.
Kudimba faces challenges regularly, but sometimes things seem to just fall into place. As is the case with the arrival of our new on-site project manager. Catherine is a strong, powerful, determined and warmhearted Malawian woman and she ticks all the boxes to lead our daycare centre. Major improvements have taken place since her arrival in Lifuwu on the 1st of May.
In preparation of the exciting upgraded Kudimba program, which coincided with Catherine’s role as the new Kudimba leader, a community meeting was held in the education centre. All parents, co workers, outreach workers, community leaders and local chiefs were invited to participate in this meeting. At this meeting Catherine was introduced to everyone and the new program was presented.
The response of the community towards the work of Kudimba and the changes that are taking place was unanimously positive. The main request from the attendees are possibilities to expand the work of Kudimba to the wider area and the wider community around the project. We are very keen to work towards this and under the lead of Catherine we are hoping to achieve more and reach more vulnerable youths.
The meeting was closed with the distribution of a 50kg bag of maize for each of the vulnerable families who are part of Kudimba, as well as for all the staff members. Due to the covid pandemic, prices of food in Malawi have risen a lot over the past year and in this way we can make the situation a little more bearable for these families.
For this reason we have increased the menu for the Kudimba children to three meals per day. The staff will also eat with the children and get free meals too.
We have employed some more new staff members to support our ever growing group of participants in Kudimba. One of the new staff members is Christopher. He is the brand new taxi driver for Kudimba. His role is to pick up and drop off all the children who struggle to get to Kudimba otherwise. Christopher is using a Kudimba bicycle for this. No doubt that he will soon be very fit and healthy. The attendance of the children has improved since we have introduced this new transport system.
We are welcoming new children very regularly now at Kudimba. We have 40 registered participants at present, however not all of them attend every day.
We have had to miss Johny for a few months now. To our great consternation Johny and his family abruptly left Lifuwu and were placed into a refugee camp over 100 kilometres away. For some reason the Malawi government decided that all immigrants had to be relocated and wait in a camp for regularisation. Johnny and his family came to Malawi a very long time ago, after they escaped from the horror which was happening in their homeland Rwanda, at the time. Johny was born on route, in Tanzania, which might be an underlying cause of his disability. Before they were relocated to the camp Johny and his family were very stable and they seemed to have integrated really well in the community, so much that we were oblivious to the fact that they are not from Lifuwu originally. They are a close family who were doing well and working hard running a small local business. We have tried to assist the family whilst they were in the refugee camp and we are very relieved that they are now able to come ‘home’ to Lifuwu. Any day now the family will arrive and we will welcome them back with open arms.
Johny
Kudimba has recently contributed towards a covid awareness campaign from a partner organisation in the Salima area, Starfish Malawi. We were impressed by their professionalism and their thorough approach. We believe that the campaign was useful and had the desired outcome.
As usual, a very heartfelt thank you to all our old, our new and our loyal supporters. Kudimba would not be possible without you.
Greetings from the Kudimba team
More pictures, movies and stories about daily life in Kudimba can also be found on our Kudimba Facebook page: Kudimba Foundation