We had planned to leave to visit the children at 9am and in good African tradition we left around 10am.
We headed to Atira school to meet the Headmaster - Richard, he would accompany us on some of the visits. Richard is an amazing man, with vision and the energy to get things done. His whole focus is on the welfare of the children and that of his community. Richard uses some of his land as a 'School Farm' to train the youngsters in farming skills. He is now wanting to get saplings to have a Tree Nursery in this farm and the children can then take the trees back to their homes to plant. He wants the trees to be Bee Friendly and, guess what, he wants to bring beekeeping skills into what he does. He now has a teacher on his staff, Michael - yes a third one so this could get confusing - who is a beekeeping and has a honey processing house. Can I meet him? No problem. So that is a further stop on our program.
Richard takes us to see land that Young Sam's family is renting, with the help of Global Care, so that they can grow casava and be self sufficient in at least some of their food.
Then off to meet some of the children:
Mercy, was first and then she had to dash off to get a 'buda buda' to the hospital for a check up.
Charles we met is one of 14 children being looked after by Rose. Rose is the lay pastor for the local church and works very closely with Richard to help the children.
Jesca - is a lovely girl, young woman actually. When we arrived she dashed off into her home, a mud hut about 10 feet in diameter, and changed out of her normal clothes into her best. Jesca had had a cow bought for her by a donation from sponsor, but unfortunately the cow died.
Gilbert is a very shy, quiet young boy. He too had had a cow bought for him by a donation and he showed it off proudly for me to take a photo. Well he did once he had caught it, which was great fun to watch. One of the gifts sent to Gilbert was a pair of binoculars. Gilbert was fascinated, he could not understand why things were so close to him when he looked through them.
As we were leaving Gilbert's home, his Uncle (his guardian) gave me a gift of a live chicken. I was advised by David (Global Care) that I could not refuse. These people have nothing but they are so generous with what they do have that it puts us to shame when we have so much and hold onto it.
Then we visited Michael -Teacher & Beekeeper. WOW it was a treasure trove of beekeeping equipment which was actually being used. Michael runs several Langstroth hives. He has a brick built honey processing shed that is bee proof and in that two stainless steel manual extractors a settling tank and storage buckets. These he used to extract and process his own honey. The frames in the langstroth supers he baited like Top Bars and that seemed to work fine for him. He is trying to set up an association locally one of the people interested i it is Gilbert's uncle.
We then visited young Sam's home to meet with his aunt and sister and also to pay my respects for his Grandfather who died recently.
Two years ago Cathy's eldest son Alex had used money from his 16th Birthday to but Sam a she goat. We had not heard much more, so I was amazed and delighted to get to Sam's home and find out that the one goat was now FIVE. Richard said that after the next set of kids were born Sam could sell some of the goats and buy a Cow. This is the evidence of how giving someone a 'Hand UP' can change their lives. For Sam this is like money in the bank gaining interest so that when he is older he will be able to sell some of his animals and pay for his further education.
We went to the Global Care centre and a quick break and then I went beekeeping with Michael and big Sam. The job was to look at the empty KTBs ( four of them), make sure they were clea, remove the wire queen excluder and re-bait them.
The first hive had a squirrel nest in it. The second a wasp nest and the othet two just need a tidy up. But I did reinforce to both Sam and Michael the need for regular checking of empty hives.
What a day.
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