NEWS

September - October 2005

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Click on pictures to enlarge

Photos from the September trip (over 300)

Nyangeta with new leg (11 pics), The visiting team (31 pics),  (Letters received (36 pics),
Letter writing (31 pics), Volleyball (21pics), New girl - Paulina (6 pics), New Uniforms (4 pics), Football (15 pics), Groups of children (29 pics),  Individual children ( 42 pics),
MDF furniture (8pics), New dorm (6 pics), Children at work (38 pics), Sunrise/set (20 pics)

 

The September trip: On September 24th the following visitors returned from their visit to Bethany: Timothy Coles, David Hitch, Rebecca Bell, Graham and Paul Pountain.

Tim, Dave, Paul, Rebecca and Rhona were involved very much with the children especially with games such as volleyball and football. They also helped with the letter writing with Rhona taking each group of children for English Lessons. Stanley and Graham worked our how to make tables, benches, boxes and cabinets from the MDF timber boards which have only recently been available in Tanzania. Stanley then went into mass production as we need 60 boxes, 30 cabinets, 15 tables ( for homework) and 30 benches (to go either side of the tables). The other members of the team were busy varnishing the finished pieces of furniture! The team also helped clean up the new dorm - things like scraping paint and grout off tiles and cleaning our the showers and toilets. Stanley and Rhona also set about some of the other unfinished work (i.e. fixing the shutters etc). Stanley was also preparing to repair (weld) our old trailer.
One event of special interest was the announcement by Paul and Rebecca that they are to be married next September (2006). The wedding is timed to coincide with a visit to England by some of the children.

Click the following to see the pics:   The visiting team, Volleyball, football, Letter writing, MDF Furniture,
Stanley and Rhona Burns stay on for another two weeks before moving onto another organisation which operates a farm in Tabora region and is run by a charity based in Northern Ireland (Tanzanian Christian Farm Development Trust ). Click here to visit their web site.
New children Paulina (Ghati’s sister aged 8yrs) has now joined us - brought to us by another organisation based in Musoma. Click here to see pics

Children no longer at Bethany:
Peterson, Harrison, Eric and Kandice (Kalokora family)
have been returned to their mother who is a primary school teacher and has a very nice house in Mwanza. It appears that we accepted the children in the first place on evidence that turned out to be false. Subsequently we discovered the truth and were able to return the children to their mother. The children were very happy to be back at home and Bethany has now four beds available for genuine cases.
Click here to see the picture of children with mother in their home in Mwanza

Lufuta James has also been returned to his grandfather. Lufuta had been at Bethany for over 5 years and is a troubled young man. This year Lufuta reached the age of 18yrs and although he had a year to go before finishing primary school the Tanz team decided that there was no more we could do for him. He found it difficult to respect other people’s possessions and property and was unwilling to work hard at school and reluctant to help with the work at Bethany. After returning him to his grandfather who lived locally Lufuta decided to return to Mwanza. His whereabouts are now unknown.

Ibrahim Tobias. Bethany has been funding Ibrahim’s 6 months training at VETA ( as a mechanic). The team also found him an apprenticeship at Fortes garage (Mwanza). He has moved to Mwanza but sadly has given up his apprenticeship at Fortes and only attends sporadically at the training centre. October is the last month we will be able to support Ibrahim after which time he will be on his own.

(Please note that this web site is accessible world wide and so we are very careful to only publish the bare facts as truthfully as possible. There are often circumstances upon which decisions have been made which we feel unable to publish. Please contact us directly if you need to know more)
Village Primary School:   All the children are doing well and working hard supplemented by extra education provided by Bethany after school

Secondary Education: Our five children (Peterson and Harrison having returned home to Mwanza) at Bulima secondary boarding school return home each weekend to help with the chores at Bethany including the cleaning cooking and field work (growing crops etc) and also in helping the younger children who are at primary school with their studies. This seems to be working well. Click here to see pics of children at work

Proposed New School: We have set aside the money from Spring Harvest (£10,000 towards a new school) and are looking at the best way of providing extra full time education (temporarily). We have decided that we will firstly refurbish our old kitchen, store and dining room (presently being used for boys accommodation) and convert them to a library, a reading/homework room and a classroom. This will start as soon as the boys move out and into the old girls dormitory.

Future Developments: We would like to embark on three projects,

1) Refurbishment of the old dormitory which housed both the girls and the boys but will shortly only accommodate the boys as the girls move into their new dormitory. This old building needs reorganising to make it more usable. We intend to provide more windows, new interior design to give a central corridor with rooms off either side. The building will need its roof redesigned which will need some new timber work and roofing sheets as well as new interior walls and doors etc. We hope to do this work in several phases.

2) Provision of accommodation for volunteers (visiting and permanent) and staff. We already have plans drawn up some years ago which were put on hold whilst we completed the new kitchen and dining room and the new girls dormitory.

3) New School. We are looking at various plans for the building work but have no clear picture yet as to what would be best.
Health: All our children are well at the moment with only the usual coughs, colds and the odd case of malaria.

Nyangeta: We reported last month that Nyangeta’s wound where she had her leg amputated is now healed and she is ready to have an artificial limb fitted. Graham and Elaine took Nyangeta to have her leg measured for the provision of an artificial limb on their trip in August. During the September trip we were fortunate enough to give Nyangeta an encouraging welcome when she arrive back from the hospital (after three trips) wearing her new limb. All the children rushed out to welcome her and after wiping away a few tears Nyangeta slid out of the Land Rover and made her first few steps at Bethany on her new leg.
Click here to see the pics. Click here to download the short video

Bethany Choir: Still singing in local churches and practicing hard!

New Girls Dorm: Things have taken longer and cost more than expected. We are trying where possible to make everything new that we put in the dorms: new beds, new mattresses and mosquito nets, new storage boxes, cabinets, tables and benches. So far we have fitted out the west wing with 10 bunk beds and hope to provide an under bed storage box (on castors) for each child, a shared cabinet between two and enough homework tables and benches so that up to half the children will be able to use them at any one time.
Click here to see pictures of the progress

Return trip to England: The children are all very keen to come on a second visit to England and we have provisionally looked at the possibility of bringing over 24 of the children. 16 girls and 8 boys. The children already know which of them might come. They are busy practicing singing English songs including ‘Our God is an awesome God’ Click here to download short video

Click here for pics of the prospective visitors to England.

Click here for the MP3 of ‘Our God is an Awesome God’

Click here for the short video of ‘Our God is an awesome God’
Next Meeting: Saturday 5th November, Hope Centre, Ossy. 10am -noon. Everyone welcome.

November trip: Alison Davies, Rebecca Smith, Jemma Turner, Jennifer Ryan, David Borland and Graham Pountain.

January Trip: Not yet planned. If you wish to be considered please apply ( email )
Staff changes: Tanz team - none, UK team - none
Sponsorship - Finance: Sad to report that one of our regular supporters who has contributed faithfully every month for many years has written to say he will no longer be able to support us. This leaves a shortfall which we pray will be filled by others. We are grateful that other moneys come from individuals, schools, churches etc. On our visit in September it was good to see the various savings that were being made at Bethany (e.g. the children were collecting fire wood to use for cooking instead of charcoal). Food was being carefully weighed out so that none was wasted. Many others in our village are going short of food at this time. All in all the team hope to be back on budget very soon (within the next two months)
SponsorshipSupporting Bethany.

Gift received from Darren, Lisa and Evan Statt. Our friends in America have once again made a special donation, the amount was $500 which converts to about 600,000 Tsh. We decided that we would use this to help buy things we were not able to buy due to attempting to stay within budget. We therefore bought new uniforms for those children who desperately needed them and also the money left over went towards the new mattresses. Eliada provided me with a list of the clothes and shoes the team bought with the money:
62 pairs of shoes, 67 pairs of socks, 12 skirts, 10 pairs of shorts, 9 shirts, 10 pairs of laces, 30 pairs of shoes repaired, 1 pair of school trousers, 1 length of skirt material to repair, (total cost of 347,850Tsh). The balance went towards the mattresses that cost 20,000Tsh each including mosquito nets.

Click here for the pics. Click here for the short  ‘thank you video’
Money boxes: As you can see our total collected from the money boxes as we publish this Sept/October update is over £656.

New publicity cards: We stiil have the postcard size flyers (financed by separate sponsorship). These are now available and are ideal to give to everyone (e.g. school children, congregations etc etc.) Please E-mail me with how many you would like and I will either post them or bring them to you. Click here to see the cards.

Pen pals group: For those of you who would like to encourage our children with letters or cards etc you may be interested in joining a group set up especially for this purpose run by ‘Shana’. This month we received two donations from members of this group towards postage. We also collected over 30 letters from our P.O. Box in Magu as well as taking letters over received in the UK
Click here to see the web site and apply to join.

Click here to see some of the postcards and letters received by the children at Bethany.
Live Link: It is now possible for us to arrange a phone link (prearranged) whereby the children at Bethany could answer questions (in English) over the phone from children in the UK. The cost of the phone call using a special prefix number is 15p per minute. This may be suitable for all sorts of groups. Please remember that only the older children can speak English and we would need to have the questions beforehand. The day and time would have to be prearranged. (We can arrange this only because recently mobile phone coverage has been extended to cover our area and the Bethany team now have cheap mobile phones). We had applied for a ‘land line’ over ten years ago and now with the advent of mobile phone coverage it is unlikely that provision of land lines other than in the cities will be pursued.

Satellite Internet: No further news

Photo Album: Click here for details.

Possible bore hole: No further news. 

Mains Power: No news, no change. Still patiently waiting

Crop growing: The District Commissioner is encouraging Onesmo our team leader to draw up an action plan for the planting of crops for the next growing season November onwards.

OTHER NEWS

And Finally: Thank you so much for being interested enough in our work to be reading this. Even more if by your donation you have made this work possible.

 

September News: Over 200 photographs
taken by the Graham and Elaine - 4th - 18th August

Brathay group arrive and settle in (53pics), Brathay Sports Day (51pics)
Brathay Sunday Service (19pics), Children playing (26pics), Children reading (7pics)
Children with letters (27pics), Children working in the fields (14pics)
Children having fun with wigs (38pics), Children enjoying their food (12pics)

August News Over 200 photographs
taken by the group visiting from visit 18th July to 4th August 2005

 Ian Kelly, Robert Skarratt, Gary Nolan, David Borland and Graham Pountain

Brathay Group visit (18 pics), Children preparing for Brathay visitors (19 pics),

Joiners, Robert, Gary and Ian together with David visit Bethany (19 pics)

Individual children (41 pics), New dorm outside (31 pics), New dorm inside (21 pics),

Children, washing, cleaning and sweeping (18 pics), Pen pals (34 pics)

Eccles Christian Fellowship ( 7 pics), Whalley School ( 10 pics),

Miscellaneous pics (15 pics)

Photos from the May 05 trip (over 300!)

when Christopher Gaster, Dave Duxbury, Bob Simpson, Paul Smith and Graham P. visited

Building progress Girl’s dorm (38pics), New dining room tables and benches (33pics)

The team relaxing (21pics), Groups of Children (18pics), Septic tank (11pics), Various (17pics)

Trip to Bunda/Serengeti (23pics), Individual Children (56pics), Skipping (14pics)
New tiles, shutters, benches and tables for dining room (8pics), Sunrise (109pics)

Cooking and eating outdoors (21pics), Children using new dining room (20pics)

_____________________________________________________________

Photos from the March-April 05 trip (over 100!)

when Graham and Elaine Earnshaw visited with Cathy Riley

Building Progress (8pics), Wigs & hand painting (56pics), Chameleon (87ics)

Schoolwork (16pics) Children singing (13pics), Teamwork (17pics), Water survey (6pics))

 

Nyangeta

Nyangeta with new leg

Click here for short video of
Nyangeta’s first steps

Nyangeta-walks

singers

Bethany singers with new song

FREE DOWNLOADS

Click here to download MP3
‘Our God is an awesome God’

Click here to download Video
‘Our God is an awesome God’

Paulina

New girl - Paulina

visitors two

The visiting group with the Tanzanian team

volleyball

Learning Volleyball

children returned

Children returned to Mum

boys-uniforms
girls-uniforms

New uniforms purchased with money donated by Lias, Darren and Evan Statt (USA)

letters

Children with letters from
Pen pals

dorm-inside

New dorm - East wing
10 bunk beds

20 photos with captions to print off and make your own A4 Bethany Album
(click here)

Children’s Trip to UK - details and over 800 photos Click here

Support/Sponsorship Click here