🇲🇬 🇲🇬 🇲🇬 – Madagascar

Last month was quite busy for The Family Africa, a proud member of the World Family Organization, as they launched several new projects in Madagascar. These initiatives included the establishment of a community health program aimed at providing essential medical services and education to underprivileged families, as well as a vocational training center designed to empower local youth with valuable skills for the job market. Additionally, The Family Africa started a nutrition program to combat malnutrition among children, ensuring they receive the proper nutrients for healthy development. These projects reflect The Family Africa’s ongoing commitment to improving the lives of families and fostering sustainable development in Madagascar.

Bruno et Françoise, Madagascar Team,

We started to build a house for a young single mother, Émilie, and her 3 children.

The husband/father abandoned them years ago. Life is difficult for them as Émilie struggles to scrape out a living to feed her family and cover her growing children’s school and clothing expenses, occasional medical needs, and the rent of the tiny, dark room they are living in. We just started building them a small house, a couple of weeks ago, on the outskirts of Antananarivo, the capital city.

It will be a new beginning for this family, as they will be able to leave their small insalubrious room to live in a more  healthy environment, in a comfortable and clean house with plenty of fresh air. Vounie and Haja, our long-term friends, and coworkers, who also supervise the abandoned mothers center, are supervising the work.

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Distribution of food items (rice, dry beans, sugar, and oil) and blankets (because the austral winter is coming soon) to 70 underprivileged families in the Antsahakely neighborhood.

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“We’ve never had such a good meal!” exclaimed the 220 poor people from the slums of Antsirabe, a city located 170 kms south of Antananarivo, who were happy to receive such a large nutritious meal. On the menu, there was chicken, plenty of very nutritious local rice, potatoes, and peas.

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Finally, after a month and a half of work, water was found at a depth of 15 meters !!

The work took longer than for the previous wells, because Andafy Saka is a village located in a rocky region, and the workers came up against extremely hard rock, which they had to break by hand with the “tools of the trade”, i.e. hammers, stakes and shovels! The well is not completely finished, the curbstone still needs to be built, but as soon as it was announced that they had found water in this village of 1300 inhabitants, the villagers rushed to taste it and fill their buckets! No more long walks to fetch unclean muddy water !

Last week, work started on yet another well being dug because there is such a need for clean water in these arid bush villages. This time, in a village called Belafiky.

As you can see on the photos, the villagers are rejoicing because they have just heard the very good news that a well is about to be dug in their vast village of 2,700 souls !

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Food canteens : we said it before, but lunchtime is one of the best times of the day for these poor school children, as it is their best meal, and for some, their only meal of the day .  Since we have already included many photos, we just chose a few happy faces of the Fenomanana and Alpha 2 canteens, as well as photos of the Friday intergenerational meal, at the Alpha 1 center, with the residents of our New Hope center.

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