Community care

The Community Centre, which was finished in late 2017, is at the heart of the Mphatikizo.  While the Community Centre is a building, it more importantly is a place for where the community meet and where a number of activities of Mphatikizo are based.  These include the feeding centre, the English language school, various community groups, and the community well is located there, as is the market garden and, in the future, the health clinic will be based there too.

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The Feeding Centre

High levels of HIV positive adults and poor living standards mean that, sadly, some children have no parents.  Typically, the wider family take the children in, but they often struggle to look after their own, let alone the added pressure of more children. As a result, orphaned children are often last in a line of hungry mouths.  To break this cycle, the feeding centre was set up. Starting in early 2018, within a couple of months the feeding centre was feeding over 160 children. The local women cook the food each day making it truly a community effort.  At the feeding centre, many community children, particularly the orphaned children, receive their main meal. This meal supplements their diet with extra variety and nutrition. These bring added benefits to the extended family by reducing the pressure of so many mouths to feed as well as the children benefitting directly.

 

 

English language school

English is the language of the government and commerce in Malawi, so people who cannot speak English are at a great disadvantage; the poor often miss out on the opportunity to learn English.  Mphatikizo employ local people to teach English so that the young people will have better job prospects and greater earning capacity when they are older. English lessons are on every Thursday afternoon after school at the Community Centre.  Many dozens of children come for their lessons.

How can you help:

We hope that one day we won’t need to run the Feeding Centre.  Through the sustainable agriculture project, and health and wellness education, our goal is that there won’t be any needy children.  But the Feeding Centre will probably be needed for some time yet. The current food cost for the Feeding Centre is around $1000 NZD per month to feed 160 children each day; that’s about 20c NZ per child per day.  Your donations will go towards the cost of food at the Feeding Centre and it will make a difference.

We envisage providing English lessons for some time yet and our dream is to have enough paid teachers to help the children learn better.  We currently have two teachers who are paid and two further teachers who work voluntary. Through the generous support of donors, we would like to be able to pay all the teaching staff for their efforts.