Thursday, December 26, 2013

Team work: The Small Things and The Duluti Initiative

Hello everybody,

We hope you had a really lovely time if you were celebrating yesterday!  Here is the link to our Christmas letter to all of you - its not too long but we wanted to write something as a thank you for all your support this year and some news on how everything is going!


We are looking forwards to sharing the pictures from Christmas this year
with you as soon as possible!
We would also like to take this time to tell you about a fantastic organization that we have been working with recently!

The Duluti Initiative is an economic training program for women based mostly around poultry and run by a great American nurse named Cynthia.  Recently, they offered to help with our chickens and we gratefully accepted! They came and gave Baba Nicky some extra training with the chickens and looked at our coop, and are paying for a cement floor, three bags of food and vaccinations for all the chickens!

It is always fantastic to be able to work in partnership with local organizations and we are so grateful for this!

Baby chicks that will grow up to feed the Nkoaranga children with eggs and meat.

Peeking into chicken coop with the Duluti initiative looked at for us!

As this is the last blog of 2013, all of us at The Small Things would like to say a massive thank you for all of your support over the past year, and wish you all the best for next year! We hope that you will continue to follow our work as we are very excited for what the 2014 will bring!

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Of Christmas trees and calendars...

The New Year is starting to look very close right now. January 2014 will be an important time for The Small Things, as we will be opening the pilot house of our children's village where Loveness, Pray, Anna, Queen, Isaak and Auntie will be living as they start school. This is a huge thing for them, so a massive thank you to all those who have signed up to sponsor them. The response to the appeal from the Girl's Gone Child blog post has been wonderful, so thanks also go to Rebecca Woolf for all her help getting the word out.


Opening the pilot house to the school-starters is also a huge step for us, as we branch out from the orphanage. It should be a very big year for The Small Things - hopefully we will have lots of successes to look back on this time next year as we move towards setting up the children's village.

We'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the success of our Holiday Sponsorship drive and to thank everyone who has signed up as a sponsor. There is no way we would be able to continue our work without your support. The 'small things' that you are all doing are going to make a huge difference. 

Look how much our tree has filled up since November, when there were only a few children its branches! The picture is actually looking even better than this, thanks to the sponsorship that has come through for Isaak just in the last couple of days. 


It's not too late to get Shalom, Irene and the twins on the tree, and we would love to get the full set!

Calendars 2014

You may know already that our 2014 calendars have been on sale for a while on the website, but we now have a couple of previews for you so that you can see just how much you want one in your home! If you haven't got your calendar for the New Year sorted yet, then we can definitely help.

Coming up in January, we have Peace looking happy and warm in the ball pit, with little Neema on the trampoline:

Then in May we have the wonderful Mama Pendo, who holds the orphanage together. Loveness is really showing how much the children love her, but the rest of them seem to be a bit more interested in her birthday cake! We also have Brighton at the top and Big Maureen showing us her strength with that chair:


Finally, my personal favourite has to be October, which features a happy Isaac, a standing Shujaa, and babies with bubbles:


The calendars are selling for $20 in the US, £12 in the UK and $25 elsewhere in the world, and there should still be time to order before the New Year! Go to http://www.thesmallthings.org/helpprojects.html and scroll right to the end to order.

For those in the UK there is also another option - the desk calendars. These are new for this year and we're interested to see how they go. They will be £6 plus delivery and we won't be able to sell them through the website, so please drop me an email on megan@thesmallthings.org with your address if you would like one. Or, just maybe, you could win one on Facebook!

Again, here is a little preview:

The front cover

March pictures Loveness looking very beautiful and reflective as she hold Isaac.

Thank you all for reading and Happy Holidays!

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Three of the happiest children in the orphanage...or maybe the world!

So everyone knows from our last few blogs that we are looking for sponsors for the kids at the moment. We want to find people who really care about these children to make a committment to helping them start out in life. We have a bit of an urgent need to find sponsors for the kids who are starting school in January:  still sponsor-less, we have Isaak, Queen and Auntie...

Here's Isaak giving us jaunty wave...

...Queen giving us her trademark massive grin...

...and Auntie giving a twirl.













But these three have already been the centre of attention for one blog. You know the need.

So, what I thought I would do this week is try to feature a couple of the other kids who also need sponsors and just give you an insight into their absolute incredible-ness. It's always tricky to be choosing between children, but my selection is based purely on the kids that I personally know the best, not on anything else. My challenge to the readers of this blog is to find someone to be a 'friend' to these children, to put them on our 'Give to Receive' Christmas tree. That means signing up to $15/£10 per month, which really isn't that much when you think about it.

So...introducing Baracka, Neema Kubwa and Maureen Kubwa. They are among the children I know the best because I met them nearly three years ago when they were toddling about around the transition from the toddler dormitory to the big kids' room. Then, when I went back last Christmas I got to see how they have blossomed at age four. Here they all are dancing together back in January:




As you can see, Baracka (at the front for most of the video clip) has tons of spirit. He was a massive surprise to me in January because when I left him a year and a half before he was very definitely still a toddler. He had (and still has) the loudest scream in the world, which he would use at every opportunity. He seemed to be quite often crying and had a tendency to run away with whatever another child was playing with. I'm not going to pretend that some of that isn't still true, but let's give him a break - he is only four!

What amazed me in January is how keen he was to help, to learn and just generally to socialize with me. He was probably the most verbal out of all the children in his interactions with me. He was desperate to learn to read, and sat and listened to me read 'The Cat in the Hat' in my very broken, spontaneous translation into Swahili about five times in two days. We couldn't tear him away from the book because he got so involved - it was all that he wanted to do over, and over, and over, and over again. He's still full of mischief, but I wanted to post the video below of him because I think it shows how smart and engaged he is. Please excuse the poor video quality and the crying in the background, I think there was a major dispute over a crucially important toy going on behind us!

For the record, we are naming fruit: pili pili = pepper; chungwa = orange; nanasi = pineapple. 

 

I am extremely proud of the progress Baracka has made and can't wait to see how he does when it is his turn to begin school!

Next, Neema kubwa (Big Neema). Neema and I have always got along well, right from when she was tiny. She was always a happy little soul, but it's amazing to see how her personality has developed. She loves to sing, loves to eat and loves to dance (as I'm sure you can see from the groove she's got going on in the first video - and that's with no music on a day that she was feeling shy). Neema is the one to find if your day at the orphanage is getting a bit much. There are never any tears unless it's for a good reason, and where there are they get blown away quickly by the next new game. She's active, a little bit of a tomboy perhaps, always on the swings and apparently has now perfected the art of the monkey bars - go Neema! Here she is with me in 2011 doing her favourite thing in the world for that week:



And here is a collage which some of you may remember from a while ago on Facebook - the endlessly-available-for-photos 'Neema grin:'


Finally, let's get on to Maureen Kubwa. Maureeni can be a little shy at first, but if she decides to shout then cover your ears! When I first met her she was the furthest ahead of these three and on the way to 'moving up' a room from toddler to child. She was gorgeously sweet wandering around when all the other little ones were in bed and the older ones (including her!) got an extra half an hour to stay up. Here she is at that kind of age:

I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I got back and they'd got rid of her little bit of hair! Once again, it seems obvious to comment on how much they've all grown up in two years, but that really is what strikes you most. I would say Maureeni is now very mature for her age. She has her best friend, Miriam, is lots more confident, and did plenty of singing with me. She's also been really into the art they've been doing in the schoolroom and she loves, and I mean really loves, the camera. Although to be honest, that's true for pretty much all the kids.

Showing off her artwork.
I'm so proud of these three. I have watched them grow for 2 years and I'm so glad I got to go back and see them and I hope I will again. I'm not encouraging you to sponsor any one of the children over the others. I just wanted to try and paint a fuller picture so that those of you who have never met them see them as the people that they are, with full personalities and a serious love of life, rather than just some cute pictures.

If you can sign up to be any of their 'friend' this holiday season (or sponsor them at a higher level!), we would be so grateful and thrilled to welcome you to the Nkoaranga family! Check out our sponsorship page for all the details.