Quick Update – January 2026

In our last post we told you how much we thought that the Christmas Appeal had raised. It turns out that some of the £1600 mentioned was from Bunyan Baptist Church in Stevenage. The final amount that was given by members of Dr Ruth’s home church was approximately £3000. I say ‘approximately’ because I haven’t quite managed to work out how much gift aid has been recovered where donors have used our CAF Donate giving page. CAF Donate automatically sort out the gift aid for us and every few weeks we get payment into our account. So thanks very much to Bunyan.

Thanks also to Palmers Green URC for their very generous donation of and also to a couple of ladies who donated several hundred pounds each as well.

What I can say is that, since the end of November, our bank balance has gone up by £5,098.96!!

We are therefore well able to send the £4560 requested by FMI in the last few days. About £600 of that bid is to ensure that the children of the families that we support are able to go to school. Education is free in Tanzania as long as you can afford the school uniform, shoes, books, exercise books, pens and pencils etc. For some of the families we support, even this is out of their reach, especially when the adults in the household are too sick or elderly to even provide food for the children.

Here are some of the children with their new uniforms and books.

[NB Being photographed is a very serious business in Tanzania! Smiling is not for cameras!!]

And below is Leticia – one of our star pupils. We have been supporting her since she was a small child. At the age of 5 she fell into a fire and sustained horrific burns. But with the support and love of the team at FMI she has been able to access reconstructive surgery that was offered free in Dar es Salaam and has grown in confidence. [There will be more surgery to come to rebuild her face and we may be helping her to get to the hospital for a few years yet.]

But, she has become the best pupil in the whole region, and the government has offered her a full scholarship for boarding at a governmental school. But that still is conditional on having the basic supplies that children need to go to school.

This just goes to prove how your support is transforming lives in Tanzania.