Our ACE Christmas Surprise!

We hope you will have seen on our Appeal page our request for donations towards a new kitchen for Atu, the Arise School cook. This is Atu’s present kitchen. It is still commonplace in Tanzania to cook the traditional way on an open wood fire. Just imagine what it must be like trying to cook porridge every day for nearly 90 children, especially in the long rainy season when the rain can be torrential!

Just before Christmas, out of the blue and as a direct result of an article about ACE in our local paper, the St. Helen’s Star, we were delighted to receive an anonymous donation for £3,000 to cover the cost of a new kitchen! Combined with the success of our “”Buy a Breakfast” Christmas Appeal which we wrote about in last week’s blog, this was the best Christmas present ever!

The new kitchen will still be fuelled by wood gathered locally. However, it is contained within a brick building and the smoke is channelled outside making it so much healthier and more environmentally friendly.

The money was immediately transferred out to the school and materials delivered as school reopened ready for building to start. The photographs show the speed with which building work is now underway!

In our wildest dreams, we never thought that we would be able to begin the new school year in Tanzania with the imminent prospect of a kitchen and the provision of breakfast to the children. In particular, the children, many of whom are malnourished, will benefit so much. This will make such a difference to their chances of making the most of the opportunity of education that they now have.

What a way to start 2015! We cannot express sufficiently our sincere gratitude to the retired, local couple who have given so generously to make the dream of a proper school kitchen possible. We are indebted to them.

We are also very grateful to the St. Helen’s Star for the publicity they have given ACE in recent months, including both the kitchen and “Buy a Breakfast” appeals.

Continue to follow our blog and we will bring you more photos of the kitchen as work progresses!