Kathy Bowler's June to September Update!
September marks the start of a new school year in Malawi! Angie has graduated from our Preschool and has started Standard One at a small private school near her home. She came to see us yesterday to see if we could help her with a chair for school as the kids in her class sit on the floor which is hard for her to do. She also came to show us that she has just started walking by herself! So far she can only walk a few steps before she loses her balance but with practice she will soon be walking independently. We are so proud of you Angie!
Bonnie, one of our children at the Mua School for the Deaf, participated in a competition at her school and won the opportunity to go to South Africa. She has just applied for her Malawian passport. Please pray that it is ready in time for her to go! It has been so much fun watching Bonnie grow up! She was so shy when we first met her.
All in all we now have 54 children attending Primary and Secondary schools in their home communities or at boarding schools for the Deaf and Blind.
Nambuma Outreach Clinic started in August. So far 21 children have been able to access regular therapy there once a week. In October we will start offering the service twice a week. On Tuesday this week the first load of equipment: walking frames, U pillows and mats went out to the site. We finally sourced 12mm plywood yesterday so we can start making the special chairs and standing frames as well. Rodrick, one of our Rehabilitation Technicians, travels on our motorcycle. The round trip is 61 kilometres! This just goes to show how faithful and dedicated our Moms are as so many of them regularly bring their children in to our centre for assistance! It also highlights why we provided Moms from this area with bicycles to make it easier to come in.
In October we start the process of locating a site for the next Outreach clinics in Chitukula and Mbavi. This will bring the number of Outreach Clinics up to 10. Harry and Shuppie, our newest Rehabilitation Technicians were hired in June so that we will have enough rehabilitation staff to cover all the programs that we want to run. We were also excited to receive funding from ERDO to purchase 2 additional motorcycles and from another donor to train the 2 newest rehabilitation staff members to ride them. This will make it much easier to get to the new sites that are so far from our centre.
We are starting our next round of Community Sensitization Trainings in October and November. This year we will offer the same trainings as last year to the 3 new communities of Nambuma, Chitukula and Mbavi. More exciting though is the new trainings which will be carried out in the 8 communities we worked in last year. The new trainings will focus on Rape and Sexual Abuse and we will be partnering with the staff and lay counsellors from Fountain of Life. On Monday the team from Fountain of Life came out to Area 25 to introduce the topic with all the Moms. On Friday they will do the first session using the Pictures from the Church Tool Kit, highlighting actual stories of children with disabilities that have been abused. We look forward to seeing how the tool kit works in starting lots of discussion with the Moms.