Hello!
We are two students from Finland named Terese Backlund and
Josefine Bjorkfors. We are studying social work and at the moment we are doing
our practical training for Ni Hekima Pekee. We are staying in Mwanza for 3
months and so far we have been working here for 7 weeks. We are doing family
work in a ward called Lwanhima. The organization has not been working in
Lwanhima before we came here, so it is very interesting for us to start to work
in a completely new area. We work together with a social worker, Gertruda, and
our translator Machimu.
The first thing we started with when we came here was to
find out how many children are not attending school in the 40 most vulnerable
families in Lwanhima. The organization got sponsored from an organization in
the Netherlands called SKKB with 1500 euro, which is enough to provide school
uniforms and material for 50 children. After finding out how many children who
are not attending school we organized a day when the families and all the
children came to the chairperson’s house to take the measurements in order to
be able to make the uniforms and shoes. Then a local tailor and shoemaker made
the uniforms and shoes and 2 weeks later we went to the school and met all the
families and children again where we gave them the uniforms and material.
It was a really good day, to see the children’s faces when they got their
uniforms. The parents were also truly grateful about our work.
After making sure the children go to school we started to
visit the families and parents. There are 40 families to visit, so it will take
some time to meet them all. After meeting all the families we need to decide
which families are very vulnerable. We have found out that some families have
enough money to get food and provide the children with clothes and the parents
have jobs, and some families have a lot of children who they can’t afford to
feed. On these 6 weeks we have left we need to focus on the most vulnerable
families among these 40.
We will update again once we have visited all 40
families and when we have decided which families we are going to focus on more.
All the families need support and advice, but some families really need our
help. We will also be doing follow ups when the children come home from school,
to show them our interest in their studies. One thing we agree on is that you
can’t just put a uniform on a child and put them in school, you need to show
the child and the family that you are interested, and also we need to find out
the family situation, if there is something going on in the family that might
risk the child of dropping out of school. That is why we do family visits and
follow ups.
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| Terese and Josefine with our dear friend |
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| From the day we were at the school to hand out the uniforms |
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| For the day we did the measurements |
