Village Ventures Africa

Good morning all,

Sorry its been so long since I wrote an update on the blog, so many things are happening here.

The visitors of japan left to visit the rest of Mali, the 2 sick ladies I housed also went on their way. The ducks are growing up, we have 27 now. A couple died, sad but then thats life, survival of the fittest. There is always a scrabble for the food at all meal times for them. I guess its normal. We decided to extend the pond for them. Today we will put the water back in for them to cool in the heat of the day -up to 45 and down to 15 in the evening-. I sleep in my gazebo and last night it seemed all wanted to sleep with me, I woke this morning to find lot of little poops here and there luckily the mat was plastic and was easily cleaned, tonite will find a solution.

A few days ago we had 2 visitors from Italy they are attached to bambinos del deserto org. Now they are linking in with me so we can do more projects, medical, childrens programmes etc., they have gone of for the week to visit the tourist areas and when they return I will take them to some of our non-tourist villages where life really is in the raw. Then they plan on staying a couple of days to help me and the villages they visit, wonderful!!

Meanwhile we are busy finishing our most expensive building adding a toilet -european style- ..Wow!! That will be a treat to the long drops we have here.

We have given seeds to one of our schools in the hopes they begin a school garden encouraging children to enjoy the garden and eat its fruits. We also gave fencing to Mambrooke earlier in the year and plan to cover costs for a well, so that all children who right now only eat once a day can have chance to enjoy vegetables and maybe set up a market garden, that for me would be brilliant.

We are also awaiting our 2 XO’s to arrive from US, early december. So we can commence the programme of giving our children chance to leaarn IT skills and gain greater knowledge about the world we all live in.

We have just spent much money on repairing the ambulance so it can continue it’s work out in the rural areas of Diema. We have 152 villages in a 60km’s area. All of which are on bush tracks out of the main town. So it hasn’t been easy to get to them, or for them to get to us. Now that will chance and we also are donating medicines, we are trying.

Need to go right now as there is lots of other work to do, every day brings with it its own challenges and always something new.