Empower Street Children's Education-Build A School

The last few months have been challenging for us all across the world.  Lubumbashi is no exception. 

The closure of the Zambian border to curtail the arrival of coronavirus in Lubumbashi led to the quadrupeling of food prices. This in turn this led to an increase in violent crime, armed robberies and unprovoked attacks. Many are struggling to make ends meet to feed their families and there has been an increase in numbers of children on the city's streets. We have just heard of an outbreak of cholera in the area of the city where many of the children we meet at our day centre sleep overnight. 

Public gatherings including our day centre were understandably prohibited due to coronavirus restrictions.  So the amazing Kimbilio team decided to take hot food and medical care out to children in desperate need of help on the streets. 

We have still been able to get some children back with their families, and others, too young to be on the streets have been offered a place in one of our four homes. 

Cases of coronavirus have slowly started to increase in the city and there is concern that the fragile health care system will not cope is the numbers of cases increases as it has in the UK and many other parts of the world. 

Some great news, the walls of the primary school building are up!  We are still searching for the finances to put on the roof.  A shipping container full of chairs and desks donated to Kimbilio by two schools in the north west is on it's way to Lubumbashi!

Back in the UK, Ian Harvey isn't able to go out to speak to our supporting Churches and our usual fairs and festivals have been cancelled.  So, Congo Children Trust Trustee, Ruth, took on the task of opening the Kimbilio online shop. https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/KimbilioShop Essential face masks, lovely bags, aprons and peg bags in vibrant Congolese colours are now available at the click of a button! Please check it out and tell your friends and family! 

All income from the Kimbilio Shop goes directly to helping children on Congo's streets. 

Thanks so much for all your ongoing support, it enables us to offer a more positive future for children at Kimbilio.  We do hope you are safe and well at this hugely challenging time. 

Links:

• Increase in insecurity in Lubumbashi
• Cholera outbreak in Lubumbashi
• Kimbilio online shop!

Happy New Year! Apologies for the lateness of our wishes. We thought we would start the year off with a little review of the last year, so here's a message from Ian Harvey, Founding Director of Congo Children Trust and Kimbilio:

Dear Friends,

We have had much fun celebrating 10 years of Kimbilio this year! Some of the highlights have been:
• returning to Congo in the summer with a UK team of 13; some with long term experience of DRC, others visiting for the first time. It was lovely to see the team and children playing games and having fun together.
• laying the foundation stone for the Kimbilio Primary School. The foundations and first 2 classrooms have since gone up! We are now awaiting the the end of the seasonal rains and have just fired another kiln of bricks ready for the dry weather.
• taking 7-year-old Chance for a birthday ice cream with the lovely lady who became her mum after she was abandoned as a baby outside the Kimbilio gates. Wonderful to see her thriving!
• the publication of ‘The Abandoned Rule Book’ by children’s author Flinty Maguire who is generously donating the royalties to Kimbilio. It makes a great present for children 8+ as well as adults. You can get your copy here for a very reasonable £5.99 www.flintymaguire.com
• the completion of a self-contained flat to provide international Kimbilio volunteers accommodation during their time in Lubumbashi.
• the CCT team visiting a number of our supporters and catching up with many of you. If you’d like us to visit your school, local or faith community in 2020, please do get in touch.

We have also acknowledged the ongoing challenges and our fragility as an organization this year.
• One of the challenges for the children was the tragic death of Dorsen’s father (Dorsen was one the boys that was working in the mines whose story featured in the Sky News report.) Dorsen returned to his family in the school holidays and arrived to find his father’s funeral taking place. It was devastating for him but he and Richard are now back at Kimbilio and doing well at school.
• The refusal of the UKBA to give Jean Bosco (Kimbilio Director) a visa to visit the UK despite the wonderful response of many of you who wrote letters of appeal including our local MP who also advocated on his behalf.
• The £ to $ exchange rate has had a significant negative impact on our finances. The £ now does not go as far in providing the necessities needed to sustain the project. Despite this the project continues to thrive which is a testament to our faithful and generous supporters.

We want to send a sincere thank you to each one of you who have enabled us to make all these things happen and who have supported us over these last 10 years. Kimbilio is a work of collaboration and partnership. We are grateful for the vision for this project and all who are a part of the wider Kimbilio family helping us to grow the vision and the work on the ground.

Yours with so much thanks and appreciation,

Ian Harvey

Founding Director
Congo Children Trust

Just a quick email to let you know that Congo Children Trust will be again joining with GlobalGiving for their #GivingTuesday event on 3rd December.

This year we are focusing on the Kimbilio school building project and are asking all our supporters to donate via the link below on the 3rd December:

https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/empower-street-childrens-education-build-a-school/

We've come a long way since July this year when the grounds at Maison Kimbilio started to be cleared for the work. The foundations have been laid and a whole room has been built. It's so exciting to see it take shape. This school will be a beacon school in the area, offering education to all regardless of their background, with former street children attending school alongside their friends from the local community.

This year, GlobalGiving are offering a proportional match on all donations up to $1000. There is $500,000 which will be distributed to all charities involved proportionally based on final fundraising totals. This means that, at the end of #GivingTuesday, the projects that bring in the most funds will win the largest portion of the Incentive Fund. So the more we raise in donations, the more of the incentive fund that Kimbilio is eligible for.

It doesn't matter how big or small a donation every donation will help build this school!

Thank you so much for all you have already done to help the children at Kimbilio.

The school foundations have been laid! David, our Kimbilio builder, and his team have done such amazing work in such a short time. We can now see the outline of the school structure. Amazing and exciting!! The team will now start to work on raising the walls and we'll update you as soon as we can.

So where do we go from here? Kimbilio still needs your support to now begin to build the classrooms and office. We're well into the swing of the new school year now and looking forward to taking part in again in GlobalGiving's #GivingTuesday event on the 3rd December and the Year End Campaign over the holiday season. We'll be focusing our fundraising for this period on the school building but we'll let you know more about it nearer the time.

Kimbilio celebrated its 10th Anniversary this July 2019. We had a weekend of celebrations with the children, including a very special ceremony where the Anglican Bishop of Katanga Province, Bishop Bertin, laid the foundation stone for our new Ecole Primaire Kimbilio.

It was lovely to see all the children gather around the foundation stone as the local area is so deprived of affordable services. There was a real buzz in the community about this inpending development, with the area Chief and dignataries also attending the celebrations. The staff and carers at Kimbilio have worked hard to build this trust and partnerships over the last decade. We hope that this continues and local families are encouraged to send their children to school along side former street children.   

The steel in bought, the bricks are dried out and the area has been cleared by our resident builder, Papa David and his team. We're really looking forward to bring you more photos and news of how the building is going very soon.