Christmas and the long summer school holidays. What a perfect combination!

Just before Christmas we were thrown a pool-party at the Arusha Hotel, for all our children, plus those from another center. Altogether there were around 60 kids – plenty of work for Katie our volunteer, and Wendy, to practice their life-saving skills! We had a wonderful time, with plenty of food, sunshine, and fun in the pools!

For Christmas week this year we tried something different – 11 of our kids who had family/extended family able to accommodate them, went home to spend Christmas with their family. This meant we had 13 children with us over the Christmas week, and we did some special things with these children.

With our 13 kids, we spent a day in Arusha National Park – plenty of giraffe, zebras, buffalo, and warthog for the children to see (for many of them it was their first time to see Tanzania’s spectacular wild animals). We even managed to spot the elusive hippos in Momella Lakes!

Then on Christmas Day we had a special meal together, games, paddling pools, gifts, and just a fun time together. Seeing Mama Debora’s football skills was great – she had more energy than all the kids!

Huge thank you’s to everyone who gave towards parties, presents, the safari, and our additional expenses at this time of year! And a huge thank you again to New Life Church for the boxes of clothes, toys, books that arrived in perfect timing for Christmas once again! The smiles and laughter as we opened presents on Christmas Day was just brilliant.

Other news:

• The chicken project: We had a setback with some bad medicine we received, and some of the chicks died. We learnt a lot from this. Many shops don’t have generators, and medicine that needs to be refrigerated is ruined during the many power cuts we have; the shops still sell it so as not to lose money. Now we are getting medicine from the best place in town that DOES have a generator. The remaining chicks are doing very well. Mama Debora and Alex have done a great job tending to the chicks. We expect the chicks to start laying in six weeks.

Seeway Trust is a registered charity no. 1074868

above On safari in Arusha National Park.

below Christmas Day.

• Elibariki has officially graduated from primary school and is looking forward to starting his secondary education.

• Arnold was first in his class this past term. Riziki, Careen, David also had outstanding reports! Joshua has improved a lot this past year at school, and Johnson and Kanuti both did well too.

• Land purchase: no news, things go sloooooow here!

• Birthdays in December: Ally and Zainabu (3)