By Agnes Albrecht | Founder of Mammadu and Manager of Mammadu Centre
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.
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