The rains are here now, first big rain was on Saturday, it seemed like the end of the world! The sky went black, massive winds whipped up the sand, dirt and rubbish and then the heavens opened. Thunder, lightening and torrential rain for a couple of hours. It was lovely when it stopped, everything was clean and bright and the next day all sorts of new insects were out and about, some nicer than others! My favourites are like small bright red spiders, they look all fluffy. We also had a swarm of flying insects, they suddenly appeared in their thousands, their wings dropped off after about 15 minutes and then they were like ants. the chickens had a great time eating them!
On to charity news here. We have had some nice donations and have started to make blocks for the fencing for Basori Nursery. Bless and his team are working very hard and I will visit this week. Hopefully they will have completed around half of the blocks needed and I will buy more sand and cement this week with the latest donations. Once we have made all the blocks we will get a price for constructing the wall. I would love to see it up this year but it all depends on the fundraising. Each block costs around 25p to make and we need approximately another 3000 blocks. If anyone would like to donate towards this project please contact us. We can accept cheques made payable to Gambia Fundraising Account, bank transfer or through Virgin Money Giving, just search for Goal For The Gambia.
I visited the Arabic School recently to take photos of the completed toilets and found that another charity is constructing one of the school buildings. I am very pleased for the school but am feeling disappointed that no one saw fit to consult with us. I am sure if we had joined forces we could have achieved a lot more. The building they are constructing is very different to our original plan. The main classroom block we have constructed still needs to be plastered and we plan to do that after we have completed the wall at Basori. We have decided though that as the Arabic School now has other support that we will complete the building we started and then look for another project where there is no other support available. We will still visit the Arabic School and take along any stationery and supplies that is donated.
If anyone has any thoughts on this decision we would be happy to hear them.
Schools will be closing in the next couple of weeks for the summer break and all the students are taking exams at the moment. A stressful time for them all but they will have about 10 weeks to recover before school starts again!
