Going home from Saturday School

4th June, 2016:

In our journeys to the heartland of Malawi, installing pumps we meet the most amazing women, living on the barest edge of existence, yet having numerous babies, rearing large families.  With nothing they cope and manage to welcome us and smile as if all was well.
These women and girls are born into poverty, have no rights, but have a myriad of responsibilities, even as girls.  They carry water on their heads when they are as young as four or five, they collect firewood, they are responsible for the growing and cooking of food, and life is hard.  When girls are doing those chores they are not going to school. Further challenges for girls include: traditional cultural practices, trafficking, early marriage, and childbirth complications.  Males are fed first, preferentially educated, and have any of the rights that exist.
 
Educated girls have fewer children, are better able to care for them, demand better access to health care and information, have better access to jobs, and are much more likely to send their children to school.
 
Our latest project is trying to enable girls to take up their places in Government Secondary schools. Fees are prohibitive for the poor but strangely only a small part of the overall cost, as we try to support families with all the other bits as well.
We soon realized that poorly paid and under-resourced teachers, working in awful conditions with huge classes could only achieve so much, so we set up our Centre for Learning as part of our factory complex to add a little assistance, and have employed excellent local teachers to assist.
 
We now have 98 girls in our care, educationally, but not all manage to reach us on Saturdays, for many and varied reasons. Not even the food entices them!
 
   
Here is one group getting a lift home. Some live up to 20 km away, we are doing our best, but lost more to do with the help of our amazing donors


The extra pics show our 12 student teachers getting involved