We were so busy today that I only managed to take ONE photo... Today was the last time we fed the kids before school starts next week. As I had frozen the left-over beef stew from 2 weeks ago I added to that with potatoes, sugar beans and mixed veg. I ended up adding more frozen veg than I had originally planned as my fridge/freezer took a beating during an electrical storm on Sunday night and all my frozen peas had defrosted!! (one of the drawbacks of living on top of a mountain, we also had buy a new modem as that blew up, and most of my plug sockets have died!! Have to work out an insurance claim now...)
Obviously, word about the bumper week last week had got out as we arrived to 50 CHILDREN waiting for us, that's double what we have been feeding. We'd kind of planned on feeding 30 kids this week as that had been roughly the number we've been getting. A lot of kids on my original list returned today. I think that possibly they've run out of the food given them at the beginning of the holiday, or else they'd just heard there was food. In any case, I now have 100 children on my list to follow up. That's a third of the total orphans in the school.
However, the beef and beans seemed to go round and be just enough. They had some bread too and we had just enough lemon biscuits to give them one each. There wasn't enough porridge but they were incredibly patient in waiting and accepting whatever was given to them. I made sure that the younger children all got some porridge to take away, everyone in Grade 3 and under got some. They also had some apples and bananas so no-one went away empty-handed. Praise God that each child got something to eat and was happy!
These few weeks have been great to get to know the children a little bit better. When such a lot come it's difficult to catch up with each one, but some children have been coming regularly and I'll start off by following them up when term gets underway. From Monday, when they return to school, they'll be getting 2 meals a day (Monday to Friday) and we'll be looking into what we can do to help out with the other meals. Now I've got some thinking to do about how to approach the next stage of caring for these lovely kids.
