Bittersweet times...

As many of you know, dear Jude will be leaving us this week. She is expecting her first child in December of this year and will go back to the UK for the remainder of the pregnancy and the birth. Jude's plans are to come back to Vilanculos near the beginning of next year, though unfortunately as a full-time Mommy and not with African Impact.

As sad as we are to see Jude go, we are so excited for the new adventure of motherhood she is about to undertake. As you all know, Jude's dedication to and passion for children has been one of the driving forces behind the success and development of this amazing project. Esther and Nix will remain in Vilanculos and do our best to carry on the brilliant projects that Jude has done so much to develop and nurture.

So, as we fight through a heap of bittersweet emotions in trying to write this post, we want to wish Jude and her budding new family all the best of luck. She will be so missed but the hard work and passion she put into these projects will be evident to us every day as we continue on.

Thank you Jude!

Dia das Criancas

June 1 is National Children's Day here in Mozambique. It's so amazing to see a community come together and rally around its youth in an outpouring of support and praise.

To celebrate the day with our littlies at the preschool we put together an assembly for the parents of the school. Our amazing volunteers helped the kids put together a banner with the school's name and all the kiddies hand prints. They also put together special t-shirts for the special 10 star-students that were selected to represent the school in our little sing-along presentation.

The kids sang so well. A particular crowd favorite was the theme-song that Zelia, Deolinda, and Esperanca wrote about the preschool complete with dance moves and all!

New Classroom!!!

We are so happy and proud to announce that we’ve officially held our first lesson in the new classroom at school! A million thanks to the number of donors who contributed to the funding for the classroom.




We’re so relieved to know that rain or shine our kiddies will be able to have their lessons. The kids LOVE the new classroom and we’re so excited when we set the tables up in there for the first time!


Our current volunteers are working on a plan to paint the classroom's concrete wall. We're hoping to order blackboard paint from South Africa in order to turn almost the whole wall into a usable blackboard space!

Sponsor a Child!

Hurrah! Sponsor A Child is up and running in Mozambique!

Inacio Lorenzo's Sponsorship Profile

We here on the ground have selected a group of about 15 children to be eligible for sponsorship that are particularly vulnerable based upon concerns about their health or their family's ability to provide for them adequately. We know these children and their families through the preschool and Bairo Desse, the zone in which our camp is located.

We have chosen to launch SAC with the children that we feel are most in need of immediate support. Once these children have all been sponsored, we plan on making sponsorship available for all of the children at the preschool. However, it's our priority to get this first group of children sponsored!

Once a child is sponsored, we will use the funds to provide them with 1 year’s education, 2 x school uniforms, 2 x school shoes, 1 x school sweater, 1 x raincoat, health checks, a year’s supply of vitamins B and C, text books and a stationery pack. Funds for sponsorship are moved through the Happy Africa Foundation, our sister charity based in the UK. We have chosen to move donations through the HAF in order to keep it separate from the money that goes towards the general operations of camp and the projects. That means that if you sponsor a child, your donation will go directly to the child you have sponsored.

Here is the link for Sponsor A Child in Mozambique with the Happy Africa Foundation.

If you have any questions about sponsorhip or would like to sponsor a child, please email Lucy, the head of the Happy Africa Foundation, at lucy@africanencounter.org

Language Club

Language club continues to go so, so well. The young children's lesson has been hosting up to 50 children recently and the soccer boys have been making great strides with their English.

Some of you may remember one of our cleaning ladies from camp, Cecilia. She, along with her colleagues Maria and Julia, have also recently started coming to Language Club. One of our volunteers, Poppy, has dedicated herself to teaching Cecilia how to read and write. It's so great to see a volunteer identify a need and then respond to it by using free time to put together learning resources and special lesson plans. It's always our goal to facilitate any sort of side project that a volunteer conceives and would like to see through to fruition.



We've already seen great improvement in Cecilia's letter recognition skills and manual dexterity. She has set herself the goal of signing her full name (instead of an "x") on May's wages slip. We know that with her hard work and Poppy's dedication to teaching, she'll achieve that goal!

Eddie's Bike!

Thanks to generous donations from a number of past volunteers, we've been able to get our translator extroardinaire Eduardo a new bike to use to get around between all of the projects!

We gave Eddie the bike the day before his birthday and we wish you all could have been here to see the massive grin that came over his face when we snuck him into the bike shop! Now it will be so much easier for Eduardo to get around between the projects and back home to his lovely family lickity split.

Thanks so much to those of you who reached out to help make this possible for Eddie.

Welcome!

Hello All!

We're so excited to be launching our very own blog here in Mozambique to keep you all updated on the projects, your donations, and all the goings on in Vilanculos.

We'll be updating the site as much as we can and it's the best way for us to stay in touch with past volunteers, new volunteers, and people that are interested in learning more about the projects.

We're quite new at all this new darn-fangled technology stuff (ok... well maybe blogging isn't that new) but please bear with us as we start getting it under our belts. If there's ever anything specific you'd like to hear about such as one of the little ones from preschool or a donation, please comment away and we'll post back as soon as we can.

All our love from Moz and until next time,
Esther