We would like to wish everyone who has supported us a very happy and peaceful New Year. Cara Projects has gone from strength to strength since our return last June. The girls rescue is an amazing success story and is now home to 15 beautiful girls with more to come. The training centre for local Masai girls, set up by Edwina, is also an outstanding success story. We were very lucky to get the support of Annek and Ina from an organisation called Humura in this project. They have purchased an oven, sewing machines and other equipment for the training school and have even taken on the payment of the teachers salaries. They have also agreed that it would be wonderful to have a second training session in the afternoons for another group of Masai girls and will also pay the salaries for this. Cara Projects would not have had the funds to do this and we really appreciate the wonderful support we are receiving from them.
Before Christmas we received some very generous donations from friends. This allowed us to buy six months supply of the basic foodstuffs and to pay for a Christmas dinner and party for the Centre. I was speaking to Edwina on the day of the party and it was a fantastic happy occasion. It is unbelievable to see the kids so happy. When I was there in October we collected one small, very scared little girl, Faith, from the children’s office to come and stay in the Centre because her granny could no longer care for her. To see her so happy and smiling in the photographs is all we every hoped for. Her smile makes all the difficult times, when we felt like giving up, were everything was going wrong, when it seemed we could never trust anyone in Kenya, when we seemed to be banging our heads off a wall, when we had no money and bills to pay…. all so worthwhile. The big difference now it that we now have an ever expanding circle of people in Kenya who we know we can trust and who understand that all we care about is the kids we can help. We also have brilliant support from many people throughout the world and so many caring and generous people here in Ireland. You all know who you are and please know how much your support means. As usual I must stress that every cent raised goes to the kids we support. There are no wages to directors or administrators etc. Everyone who works here for the better of Cara Projects does so voluntarily.
For our 2013 project we have decided to travel in February and a group of 17 are getting ready to go on 8th February. We will complete the fish project which we started last year but did not have the money to finish, set up a chicken and possibly a rabbit project. Now that the main construction work is done we hope to focus on the interior of the home and making it more home that institution. We will focus on providing furniture and soft furnishings, mosquito nets for all the beds and volunteer rooms, equip a library, playroom, creche for the masai girls babies and so on. We also hope to put a nice fence around the outside play area and would love, with permission from the local community, to provide a playground for the local children, simple swings would suffice. It is difficult for the local children to look through a fence at our children playing but would be impossible to let everyone in. We have many dreams for Cara Projects…… a borehole……ship over a container of goods… bring over a minibus purchased here as they are much cheaper to buy here…. lease sewing machines to the locals for a very small fee to allow them to set up their own small enterprise, ECDL courses for kids who never got the opportunity to go to secondary school….. etc etc etc….. A HOUSE IS BUILT OF BRICKS AND BEAMS, A HOME IS MADE OF LOVE AND DREAMS……. AND OUR DREAM GOES ON…..