Author: Katharine

Amani’s youngest supporters are the same age as our children themselves!

Meet Lieselore!

Lieselore is only 7 years old. She fundraised € 210 (Euro) by making and selling bookmarks, keyrings, cookies and biscuits. She even donated all her allowance from household chores.

Lieselore’s incredible donation helped us do some much needed repairs at Amani. Her generous gift funded tiling the boy’s dormitory. This ensures our kid’s home is easy to keep clean and hygienic, even in the rainy season!

Thank you Lieselore!

On behalf of Amani Children’s Home and Amani foundation team, I would like to thank your contribution for building the wall with the gate, buying mattresses, painting dormitories, supplying water to all building in the center, putting tiles in girl’s dormitory, building a place for keeping cow grasses, refilling the fire extinguisher, bed covers, new stove (10 – 25litres), buy new beds, new tables and chairs for dining hall and new mosquito nets.

Your support helps us continue in our mission and assist our kids in our center.

The generous support of individuals like you makes it possible for our organization to exist and to make Amani a great place to live.

We are delighted to announce that this year Ms Edna Lyatuu Hogan who resides in Dublin will be running the VHI Flora Women Mini Marathon again to raise money for our orphanage centre and other social enterprises in Tanzania.

Edna has been a great supporter of Amani orphanage for many years and she has done a lot for the centre-from donating computers, school essentials for our kids, food and money. To us she is a mother to our orphans, a sister to our volunteers and a friend to us all here.

Please join Edna at this year’s marathon and help her raise the much needed funds for our children and other charitable projects that she is very passionate about.

Go Edna-we love you-you can do it,

With so much love  from all the children and staff at Amani Children Home.

As the new year begins, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on some of the generosity of the past year. Our 2016 archive is filled with stories of donations and projects that make it possible for Amani to exist. Among them, we are grateful for the continued support of Eddy, Chantal and Siebe Verhoeven who contributed doors and windows to our dormitories and establish electrical infrastructure for our classrooms, built by John McCauley. A more recent donation helped us install more electricity, provided food for our kids and got our motorcar (“called a tok-tok”) up and running again! This way we can drive in supplies, saving time and energy. Thank you to the Verhoevens, and all the incredible people who helped make 2016 a great year. We’re excited to continue our work as we ring in 2017. Amani would not be here were it not for the kindness of our international sponsors.

Please note:

We love to feature stories of projects and donors on our website. However, it can take time to post updates as we are all volunteer staff with many responsibilities.

If you would like your story featured, please email us information about your project! When donors and volunteers send us photos and articles we are very excited to publish them. Not every donor wants to be acknowledged publicly, so we rely on your approaching us or completing our forms for documentation.

We’d like to celebrate the long-time contribution of two of our donors, Richard and Mable Seymour, by featuring a write up in their own words.

“Our Involvement with Amani Orphanage In Tanzania, Africa.”

We visited Amani Orphanage on April 11, 2013 while on tour of Kenya and Tanzania with Vantage Travel. Our tour director was Seif Mohamed. Seif asked the group on the tour if they would like to visit an orphanage and all agreed to do so.

While there, we met Amiri Adamu and others. While taking a tour of the then-current facilities, I noticed a large black water tank laying on the ground and that caused an inquiry. We had see  the new showers and toilets, but were told they did not have water. Also, we were told that they did not have the funds to erect the water tank on a tower so that the water from the tank could be piped into the toilets, showers and wash basins.

Upon getting home, I worked with Seif Mohamed & Amiri Adumu to get an estimate for the cost to build a tower, erect the tank on the tower and pipe water into the showers, toilets and wash basins. That began our more deep involvement with Amani Orphanage. This first project raised money from a number of people in our community and church to buy the materials for erecting the tower, placing the tank on the tower and piping the water to the showers, toilets and wash basins.

Another project helped to purchase a number of metal beds with mattresses.

One of the key projects that came next was the “canal” and dry well to dispose of “dirty water”.

Another project that was water related was the purchase and installation of a pump motor to bring water from the community well to the water tank.

Upon making a photographic presentation at our Church which included pictures of the orphanage, one of the ladies in charge of the Knitting Group suggested that they could make knitted blankets for each of the 38 kids in the orphanage. That launched a knitting project which actually exceeded the 38 blankets for the kids. The ladies made various sizes of blankets including several adult sized blankets.

Ladies participating in the blanket knitting project were:

Noreen Radke, Lois Ostling, Fran Schiel, Terry Froelich, Pat Prauda, Ann DeFeo, Aloha Hicks, Lorraine Usten, Barbara Humphry, Marianna Sherman, & Mable Seymour

Many donations have been made for purchase of food and other supplies for the orphanage.

Eleanor and Craig Hibben, Kathy Martin, Barbara Knappa, Sylvia and Ken LaChapelle, Matty and Gary Barber, Linda and Bruce Ohlinger, Seif Mohamed

Education Commission of First Presbyterian,  Church of Yorktown, NY