JUAf’s top three priorities for 2011 are… Preschool, Solar Power and Property Boundary!

Our plan for this year is to build a preschool so the children in the village and surrounding communities are able to get an excellent early childhood education prior to starting grade one. The community currently does not have a preschool for children age 3-7 to learn and grow. Children typically spend the day with their mothers working the crops in the fields, and walking several hours a day to get grass, and water for the cows and goats. It has always been a priority of JUAf to provide early childhood education for the children of the village in order to intellectually, and creatively thrive. The preschool will also help the mothers to be able to work and build a successful small business while their children are in school.

We started to register students for our JUAf Preschool in November 2010, and we started the year with 15 children. We were fortunate to hire a preschool teacher from the community who happens to have have a certificate in preschool education. She also speaks fluent English! Her name is Rose, and she is fabulous with the kids! We also hired a woman named Sabina to be the cook of the school. Sabina cooks up three meals a day so the children have well nourished meals to support them with their learning.

While we are constructing the preschool, the children are being taught in the JUAf Community Center. We expect to have the preschool complete by the end of the year, and will need to furnish it with desks and books next year. The school curriculum was set by one of our management team members, Abdule. Abdule has a certificate in teaching at the primary school level, and he has set a curriculum that matches if not exceeds Tanzanian program standards. It is the only english medium school in the area.

Although the building of the preschool, and the salaries of the teacher and cook were provided by generous donations, we DO expect monthly fees from our JUAf members. We do not want to encourage ‘free handouts’ to our community. We want to empower them to empower themselves. We have school fees of 20,000 TSH a month ($14) per child. The funds will help support the overall food budget, and contribute to salaries to run the school.

On a final note, many of the children attend class in the same outfit everyday. I reached out to friends and asked them to provide me with clothes that their children no longer wear. We received over 200 kilos (400 pounds) of childrens clothes. My mom came out to visit the project and brought the clothes with her. We decided to give the children one outfit per month, and the kids were thrilled with their new clothes!

We’ll be investing in solar power this year to help us pull water from our well. It costs JUAf approximately $5,000 year to provide clean drinking water on a daily basis to the village. It’s due to cost of gasoline to run the generator. So, we will be investing in solar power water pump, solar panels, and pipes to draw a continuous flow of water to our tanks daily. It’s a payoff that will take less than a year to payoff. I’ll provide pictures of the panels and the set up once we have selected the manufacturers. We have been working with providers based in Tanzania and Kenya, and expect to have our decision made very soon.

We are investing in building a boundary around the property, and the work is almost complete. The purpose of this boundary is to protect our assets. We need to protect our crops from the community goats and cows that want to feed on our vegetables during the day and night. We need to protect our water at night to make sure that it is not be misused. We also need to protect the preschool, and the children during class time. Finally, we need to protect our investment in solar power, piping and pumps to provide water to the community.