Education, Nutrition, Health and Safety to 60 Kids

Dear all

On the 1st November was our anniversary and Mammadu is now 3 years old. For weeks the kids have been preparing this huge event. And then, what happened on the first November? It rained! Well here in Namibia rain is considered a real blessing and anyway we were very lucky because it stopped precisely for our show. Everything was wet, but at least there was no dust!

9 am our party started, but the children were already at 7 am at Mammadu, all exited, some of them haven’t even been sleeping the whole night, they were so happy. The day before the rehearsal didn’t go well, but this is nearly normal for us. Anyway it didn’t matter, so we put on our best t-shirts, those with the rainbow (matching perfectly with the weather) and we were ready to have fun and enjoy our party. To begin August spoke some words of prayer for all of us and then it was immediately time for our little ones of our pre-primary, it wouldn’t have been possible to keep them waiting any longer. They sang a song and told a little poem, which they have been practising with our bible teacher Margot. Thanks’ Margot. So sweet and cute. This year I didn’t have any duties during the whole anniversary so I could just watch the performance and enjoy the kids, photos and movies were taken by Elisabeth and Ernst and huge thank you goes to them for that. So I could be spectator like the pretty mom of Kasuko, she looked stunning in her traditional dress. The whole performance was created by the kids, the speakers were Munio and Victoria and they did a great job, very professional but funny too. We truly can be proud of them.

After the little ones came the gym show. Lukas performed spectacular jumps on the trampoline while the girls and some smaller boys built a human pyramid. The trampoline was a donation from Michaela K., a thank you to her too. Vini, was balancing on the top without hands on Josia and Petrus and the “strong” Kasuko, Leandric und Victoria were the pillars and carried them all! . Munio was on stand by just to help if necessary.

Once the ”stage” hand been prepared again was the part of our dancing group. The kids chose the songs and Marion von Mahlzahn did the Choreography, she also practised a lot with the dancers, thank you Marion. The walking in song was a Zumba song which greats all Nations, very suitable for Mammadu and following came “Price Tag” here some words of the text “Why is everybody so obsessed? Money can’t buy us happiness. Can we all slow down and enjoy right now?” The children have been very interested in the words of this song and we talked a lot about.

And then… then came our very special Fashion Show. The girls, together with Luise, one of our Volunteers, presented their hand made dresses and handbags. Please have a look to the details. They were also wearing jewellery, hand made too with the help of Nadja (also a volunteer), unfortunately one doesn’t see the jewellery well on the photos.

Our Birthday cake, well what can I say regarding that! It tasted well and it looked nice but….. unfortunately there was a spelling mistake!! The cake was delivered warped so I didn’t notice it immediately and once we found out it was too late, so we had to keep it like it was. What a pity. Well English is a problem! At least for the baker.

We ate it anyway and nothing was left over.

As final came our Birthday song played on the guitars and sang by the kids. Volunteers, first Floris and then Coco, spent hours to teach August and Lorenzo with a lot of patience and love. I’m really not musically talented but I downloaded an app to be able at least to tune the guitars.

The birthday song wasn’t the normal “Happy Birthday” but a special composed creation. One of our neighbours was so kind to perform it together with the kids as they had a bit of stage fright. They are not yet perfect and yes it can still be better and they were a bit shy too but it was so sweet and loving for me that I couldn’t stop my tears. The whish for a long life for Mammadu was just hart warming and wonderful.

Here the link if you want to listen to it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z12Bqb5XsM

And here you find a part of the fashion show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrpU50LwAus&feature=youtu.be

Of course Mammadu had been cleaned up and decorated for this big happening thanks to the help of families and volunteers. Jesus (Volunteer) even helped with nearly free climbing capacities to fix one of our high lights. Great that he is in his “real life” a fire worker and doesn’t suffer heights! And I don’t have to tell you about the big eyes of our children when they found out that his name is Jesus, but he is from Spain and there it’s a quite common name.

A big thank you goes to all of you, thanks to your donations all this is happening. 

Agnes Albrecht

Let me introduce to you our two new classrooms! They have been sponsored by an Italian Province and by Nadir and Italian Non profit organization. Now in total we have three classrooms and we named them by their colours. The orange one is for the bigger kids, so they have their own space where to study silently and do homework without the little ones make noise. The green one is becoming our workshop / craft centre, where the kids can learn different kinds of things. Not everybody is going to become an architect or a lawyer, so it’s important to teach them manual skills too, like how a battery works or how to use properly tools and the girls can start using our sewing machine.

Our first classroom, the yellow one is used now the pre-primary learners during the mornings and by the lower primary learners in the afternoons and still works as cantina for all of them.

It is so great to have all this space, even the nurses during the last immunization program enjoyed to have an inside space, where one is not constantly bothered by wind sun and dust. Unfortunately we missed one immunization session because of the building phase and we are very sorry for that but it was truly impossible to accommodate them with all the workers and materials, noise and dirt around. So now we are happy to have them back and to accommodate them in one of the classrooms. So finally from next year we will be also able to increase the number of children at Mammadu.

One of our sponsors donated a whole box of Herbalife products; they are highly nutritional and help the children with their diet needs. These products are highly balanced and nutritionally reach, but the most important think is, they taste very good. So it’s not true that healthy things are not tasty!

During the last holidays, as the kids have worked hard at school and their reports have been very good, we did a lot of outings. We went to the shopping mall as it is always such an experience to use the escalator, (What goes up, must come down!) and we had a jump into the swimming pool, but truly just a jump as it was still quite cold.

The kids truly did well at school, we could see a lot of improvements, so we have to say a huge thank you to all our volunteers who visited us during the last months. Their constant hard work, practising every day maths and English is admirable, it takes a lot of patience, dedication and love. Coco, a guy from France, not only did maths with them but finally got Lorenzo to play truly the guitar ad love music and practice every day. Lori by now is really good in playing it. You should hear him. But also Kevin is trying and Uzu is happy when she can hold the guitar!

Often volunteers, when they contact me, ask me how the first day will be, if the kids will accept them and if they will be accepted by the kids. Believe me, the problem is not the first day but the last, when one has to say good bye. It is always so hard breaking and sad and there are always so many tears from everybody because at the end of the day Mammadu is like a big family and when somebody departs it’s somebody of the family leaving. But sometimes our volunteers come back, like Roberto did. He had been here two years ago and he came back this year, as he doesn’t speak English he just cooks Italian food for the kids, and they love it.

But with the new technologies available distances become shorter for Mammadu too, Skype and whatsapp make it very easy to stay in touch with each other!!! The kids couldn’t believe that it was possible to talk and see each other on the laptop. And it’s for free. It was an unbelievable experience for them to talk with Coco, he had to show them all rooms of his house, his music instruments, guitars and piano and at the end August even asked him to show them his fridge and what was inside the fridge. And that was really very funny.