Africompassion Progress Update March 2025

Friends, I am grateful to report that we have completed construction on our school building that includes six classrooms and eight offices and meeting rooms and a covered courtyard. We have also completed construction on our toilet facilities that includes eight full bathrooms.

I am excited to share we are making great progress on our classes this year. We have a small 4th grade class, 3rd, 2nd, 1st, K, and preschool classes with about 130 students. Our four teachers, Boniface, Linnet, Kadama, and Ann teach individual subjects for all grades and rotate classrooms. With finishing the classrooms we have added about 35 students and expect to add another 70 students to the school this year.

Students and preschool teacher Ann, new toilet building.

Student Medical Support

One of our students, Andrew, was born with a club-foot defect It was painful to watch him walk on the side of his foot!

I am excited to share, thanks to the generosity of a sponsor, he received correctional treatment and surgery last week! We are excited for him and his widowed mother and three siblings and look forward to seeing him walk, run, and jump soon! (See photos below.)

The funds donated were not sufficient to cover the whole cost of treatment and we are trying to raise $1,000 to finish paying for his treatment. If you would like to help with Andrew’s medical treatment costs, please visit https://africompassion.info/helpandrew 

Left: Andrew when I first meet him in 2023. Top-center: foot before surgery after initial correctional treatment. Bottom-center: foot before any treatment. Right: Andrew and his mother in the hospital following surgery.

Humanitarian Service Expedition

A group of eight travelers will be travelling at their own expense on June 5 for a 12-day trip to the village where we will perform service at the Africompassion School for Hope, a primary school for impoverished children and work with villagers to perform community service. We have three openings available if you would like to join us! For more information, visit: https://africompassion.org/expedition 

We will be bringing 12 extra suitcases of supplies for the students and school, including medical and first aid, dental, schoolbooks and sports supplies. We will also bring re-usable feminine hygiene kits for impoverished girls at a nearby secondary school.

I will be traveling a week earlier to bring teacher’s guides and manuals and coordinate details for the trip and work with school staff and Jerald Malamba, the director of Africompassion in Tanzania.

Our goals include working with villagers to help clean the community, repair homes, build a home for a widow, and install rainwater collection systems for widows. Our goal is to help instill a spirit of service in the village and show how they can perform projects to serve the poorest of the poor. We will also work with village leaders on plans for a future development of a vocational training and community education center.

We are seeking to raise money for supplies for the trip and encourage you to donate and share this opportunity with friends and family. You can donate at this website and view a list of needed supplies: https://africompassion.info/tripsupplies 

If you have not yet made a donation to Africompassion in 2025, would you consider reviewing your giving plans and making a generous donation today?

ICEB (Interlocking Compressed Earth Block) design project

The Africompassion ICEB team has made good progress on creating a block design and machine design to allow us to reduce construction costs for school buildings by 40% and also to allow villagers to build inexpensive, high quality and durable homes. We have finalized the block design and are working on the machine prototype design. Our goal is to create an open-source design that Africans can use to manufacture low-cost block making machines that produce high-quality blocks that can meet required building strength standards. Here are some photos of 3-D printed model blocks.

We are very grateful to have completed our first building and have six classrooms for students!

In the photos below, you can see the finished building and toilet facility and shipment of another 105 desks for the school! We feel very blessed and I am excited to be going again to Tanzania in June to work on plans for adding more students to the school and working with teachers to improve the school's curriculum!

These children truly have a bright hope through your support for the Africompassion School for Hope! I hope you can reflect on and consider the value of and education for them and how it can change their lives! It is hard for us to imagine the lives of poverty and difficulty these children live. We are opening their lives to a brighter future and invite you to join us!

I am 100% committed to helping this school succeed and I invite you to keep supporting us! If you have not made a contribution this year, would you please support our efforts to bring a real change to the lives of these wonderful children?

Steve Whitehouse

CEO

Africompassion