Happy New Year to all our wonderful supporters, we may be well into January 2025 but this update will be a rewind on our November and December adventures of 2024, stay with me..

November and December is a blur of Christmas and preparing for the new school year all in one. Personally it doesn’t feel anything like the UK Christmas festivities with my family that I know and love but this being my fifth Tanzanian Christmas I am now fully prepared for the combination of fried bananas on Christmas Day, ridiculous levels of traffic in the city for all of December and becoming best friends with the Christmas clothing market vendors amongst other new traditions!

The aim was to complete Christmas shopping in November and I was about 75% successful. As a charity team we identify children in our programmes who are most at risk - those who will have no other provision over Christmas without our help. These children are provided with a new Christmas outfit as a necessity because it will be the only new clothing they get for the whole year. Then we share the opportunity with sponsors to provide a Christmas gift for their sponsor child and as I have witnessed this year, we have a sponsor family of last minute shoppers! In my determination to ensure every single high risk child and every single gifted sponsor child had the opportunity to go shopping in time, I was definitely still to be found in the market the week before Christmas! The whole of Tanzania (an exaggeration but it feels like it) floods to the market the week before Christmas to shop for clothing and so in-between praying for parking spaces, running from rain showers and trying to remain as patient as possible while our kids slept on the floor waiting for us to be served, we did it!! The ‘glow up’ photos are incredible and although I will always be exhausted after this season it fills my heart knowing how much joy this simple gift of clothing brings not only at Christmas but for the whole of the following year.

Our Hope and Soul Daycare has had its own little ‘glow up’ this Christmas with thanks to our Annual Christmas Fundraiser and a number of additional generous donations. We have added gravel to our driveway area which is much safer for the children to play on and less dusty saving on our water bill! Ron has been working so hard to nurture the grass which was then sadly dug up in large parts to place foundations for our climbing tower, slide and nest swing. As soon as the playground was in place we would have a considerable group of local children at the gate daily asking to ‘swing’. The kitchen had a new paint job (very much needed) and we had tiles laid in the garage which will now serve as our new Hope and Soul office. We closed for three weeks over Christmas and thanks to our final ‘£5 Friday’ of the year we were able to send all of our children home with generous food parcels. Putting up the Hope and Soul Daycare sign outside our front door was a huge blessing for me personally, the moment to stop and consider what God has done through our hands in just five months and the resulting impact we are already having on a community in such need - very thankful and humbled indeed.

On the 6th of December schools closed and we collected our little troop of boarding school children and delivered them all home safely for the long five week holiday. Usually schools open after one month but this year the government decided to add an extra week! We were very thankful for the extra week to have more time to finish our school uniform and resources shopping. Again this is a task that we start as early as possible in December because it honestly takes hours to collect all the necessary items from the uniform shop, the fabric shop, measurements with the tailor, the second hand shoe market, the stationary shop and for boarding school children we even have to go to the hospital for a mandatory health check. However, it does not matter how early I think we have started there will always be three extremely full on days before the opening of school! This year we also had a larger number of Secondary School starters who have been given the opportunity to go to boarding school thanks to Hope and Soul support and this requires a huge shopping list! Jenipha our social worker had three weeks of holiday and on returning hit the ground running to support me with the ongoing action plan and we are extremely thankful that just as quickly as they all came home, they all safely returned to school on January 13th.

Looking back at my November and December photos I am in awe of how much we achieved because of the ongoing support we have from our sponsors and donors, thank you for making it ALL possible. Apart from what I have already shared we were also equally just as thankful that little man D got a much needed pair of glasses, we finished a house build for a single mother with five children, four of the mamas in our micro-finance project started their businesses, we hosted our first Daycare Christmas party, our annual orphanage Christmas party was an incredibly humbling and joyous event, two children were reunited with family, three children experienced an incredibly loving Christmas thanks to foster placements, countless new Christmas clothes were purchased, a cinema trip, a daycare graduation, Christmas in the sunshine and squeals of excitement on our new ruby red daycare slide! What a wonderful end to an incredible year for all of our children and families. We are hoping and praying that this health and happiness continues into 2025 as we look forward to growing our daycare in February and continuing with all our projects creating and sustaining incredible life changing opportunities for children and families here in Arusha, Tanzania. Happy New Year indeed…