Contesa support for hammermill

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Makeni Webmaster

Back in June, Makeni Centre was visited by a group of people representing British charity Contesa, including Esnat Avon. Contesa met with members of staff to discuss the centre’s needs and tell us more about their work, which focusses on supporting AIDS orphans in Zambia.

Makeni centre has been wanting to process its own maize crop for some time now. As I write, harvesting of the local maize is well on the way. The crop goes towards the orphanage and our staff, and by products also can be used as stock feed for the pigs and chickens.

Processing the crop is a costly business however, and so the ability to do this for ourselves is a valuable thing. We are delighted to report that Contesa decided to fund the purchase of a hammermill for the centre’s use and also for incidentals required to house the mill itself. MEC has now received a sizeable donation for this purpose.

We have already identified a local builder for the structure to house the mill and we hope that he will be able to start very soon. A site near the carpentry workshop has been selected.

There have also been discussions about funding education for a group of children in the orphanage.

We are extremely grateful to have made contact with Contesa!

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Quilts for the orphanage

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Makeni Webmaster

I received this wonderful news by email today:

We are a group of about 20 women working from the ClearView Christian Reformed Church.  We have designed 33 quilts for an orphanage in Zambia. God has sent us an interesting group of women with a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds with all of us sharing a heart for the poor, the suffering or those in need of comfort. One 80 year old lady has knit 33 small pairs of slippers to go with the quilts.

The orphanage we have chosen is “St. Nicholas Home” a part of the Makeni Ecumenical Centre in Lusaka, Zambia

We hope that the children will appreciate all the effort that has been put into these quilts – we know how much work it must have been! It is great that new supporters keep coming forwards to support the work of Makeni Centre and the orphanage. Hopefully we will be able to show you some pictures when the quilts arrive.

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Holland Visit

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Makeni Webmaster

Joe Silwenga reports…

On behalf of all who travelled to the Netherlands, I wish to express our sincere gratitude and thanks to all the Friends of Makeni, Scholengroep Zuid-west, Hanze University, Kloosterkerk Worldwide and many other individuals and organisations that hosted us. The visit was impacting, memorable and useful to us as individuals as well as to the organisation – Makeni Ecumenical Centre.

We are grateful for all the fruitful meetings, workshops and thought-provoking discussions on various issues and projects of and on Makeni. We enjoyed your hospitality and friendliness throughout our stay. We are also grateful for the personal and organisational gifts which you gave heartily. Your interest in the work of Makeni is exceptionally challenging. We are now doing our homework on various issues in order to share and orient our friends on our experiences for the two weeks we were there. I am sure they will be motivated and be involved in the change processes needed. They will also learn more about the Netherlands from the “fellow Zambians’” perspective. Discussions have been set for next week.

We send our kind greetings and wish you many heavenly blessings.

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40th anniversary spring cleaning

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Makeni Webmaster

I am having a go with wordpress as a possible way forward for this site…

My hosting package is creaking a bit, PHP v 4, but it all seems to have installed okay, and with the usual messing around with chmod, seems to be working.

This may well be an interim setup, but after a day or two of playing I am starting to like wordpress. I may have to move the whole website over to a new hosting package in the next year or so.

In the meantime I am trying to port everything to wordpress. The MEC website has probably been due a spruce up (some would say a chucking out) for a long time. If I get all this done I will be able to export and import at its next home.

Why now? Well, we are approaching our 40th anniversary, if we haven’t passed it already. This year will see some celebrations in October. Be there or be square :-)

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