Rock Walls

          Apparently, Stacy and I needed some adventure in our lives. We had one interesting morning, yesterday! On our schedule, we had planned to visit one of our CBCCs (community based care centers). As I have mentioned before, our ministry partners with Feed The Children to provide Vitameal to almost 1500 children all over this area. Vitameal, like it sounds, is a vitamin-enriched porridge that was developed to counteract malnutrition. These CBCCs also spend time teaching the young children that come daily. We have twelve local feeding centers that are under our care… and I use the term “local” lightly. One of the things we want to accomplish while we are here this fall, is to visit all of our centers and help them to improve in certain areas. Some of our centers are doing better than others, and we really want those who are excelling to reach out and help those CBCCs who are struggling. In my opinion, Malawians helping Malawians goes much farther than our temporary assistance. It is our goal to get them involved in helping each other grow.

          So, back to our adventure… yesterday, we were to visit this Kanjati feeding center. It is one of the most successful centers; they are really invested in this program and have done lots of things right. You can know of their determination for this program when you come to understand that these leaders walk over three hours (one way) to pick up the porridge from Esther’s House each month. Bruce, who is on our staff as a house parent, escorted us this morning – giving us directions. He is the one who checks on these centers regularly. We started out down a particular road that I have travelled many times. However, I had no idea how far this road actually went. Villages and towns just kept popping up, and the terrain got rougher with each one. Stacy is my hero for getting us there… mind you, we have experienced lots of firsts on this trip – driving in Malawi for the first time being one of them, driving a standard vehicle another! There were times yesterday that it felt like our Land Cruiser was actually climbing rock walls. I failed to get any pictures of the so-called “bridges” we crossed, but you get the idea. Bumpy, first gear kind of stuff. There was an intern here this past summer, Matt, who actually biked to Kanjati with Bruce. We are impressed to say the least.

          We made it, and our car made it too! When we arrived at the feeding center, there were no children. Sigh. One of the leaders explained to us that they have had more children coming to their center and so they had run out of porridge. Kanjati is feeding almost 200 children each day. This is a problem because there is supposed to be a limit of 120 children per feeding center. This is simply because that is how many portions of Vitameal are provided. But how do you turn malnourished children away because they are numbers 121 and 122? Hopefully, in 2012, we will be able to fix this issue by starting another feeding center nearby so that this center can split itself in half. How awesome- that they have grown so large and are reaching so many children!

This is a picture of Kanjati's kitchen. It is currently under renovation. Most feeding centers do not even have the means to cook inside of a building; rather, they simply use a large pot on top of an open fire.

Ok, I lied... there were a couple of sweet faces present when we arrived :)

The adventure continues. Because the children weren't there yesterday, it looks like we will be heading back to view their program on Monday!