Ikombe - at the shore of lake Nyasa

Traveling to Ikombe is always a bit special: apart from a 2-hour walk, the only way you can get to the village is by boat. My company of today loved that much more than the bumpy roads of the last couple of days.

On this trip I'm joined by Brian and Ilona from Premier Brands from Canada, one of our biggest contributors and by Johan Dekempe (Belgium) who as a private person gave us already twice a considerable amount of money for our project. Also on board is my daughter Kim and her husband Bob plus my 2 grandchildren Robbe and Bette.

We visited this village last November, when we made our little movie. During the village meeting they promised to start immediately to rebuild their oldest building. They kept word and now, 7 months later we can celebrate the inauguration of 2 new classrooms and 1 teacher office. They are very welcome as they only have four more classrooms for their 630+ pupils.

As the budget is available, they will this year clean up the other 2 buildings, so that next year (2019) we have our hands free to build a new 4-classroom building to reduce the pressure.  Provided they will get more teachers we will do this again in 2020.

The handover ceremony was great and at some point in time we all ended up at the "dancing floor". Speaches were held. My grandson Robbe (11) did it in Swahili, which was extremely well received. Ikombe is famous for its pottery, so you can imagine we all left with a lot of gifts from local producers. Very beautiful.








Fons Maex