Mark Preston’s description of Kondanani Zambia’s first visit to Kaanga: “My wife Isabel and I had travelled to Gamela and Kalalusaka to monitor improvements at the villages with the ZOCS team and Mayor of Choma and he asked if we would mind diverting on the way back to Choma to visit a small village of Kaanga where he, the Mayor, was very impressed by the effort and enthusiasm of the village, and he hoped ZOCS and Kondanani would consider supporting the school.

We travelled for what seemed like a long distance, but was actually quite short according to my GPS because the roads were so bad and the 4WD’s that we were travelling in had to travel so slowly to traverse the dry route (I can’t imagine what it would be like in the wet season).

What we saw when we arrived I can only describe as impressive: the effort that the village had gone to build schools houses, toilets and to begin to create the bricks required to build more school buildings. I was impressed by the effort that has already been put into the school and think it is a great project to support.’

Isabel alerted us to the fact that Kaanga is always cut off from the rest of the country when the rivers flood. You’ll notice Isabel standing by the piles of bricks ready for the building of a 1 x 3 classroom block.

Zambia Open Community Schools (ZOCS) reports to us that already the community has a full Parent Community School committee in place, which demonstrates their willingness to be active in the school development plan. ZOCS suggests that income generation activities of chicken and goat raising will be of assistance to this community. (as supporters will recall the goat scheme has been of great value in numerous communities.)

Presently at Kaanga there are 96 male students, 128 female students, with two male volunteer teachers. The Parent Community School Committee has 5 female and 5 male members.