October 2005. An expanded San Michel home/The Australian School/Crop seeds

It's been a tight squeeze at San Michel..the home for 32 orphans, 17 boys and 15 girls at Msema which The Australian AIDS Fund Inc bought for them in March this year.

Here they'd all just got back from the shops after a clothes-buying spree, showing off what they'd bought!

The Australian AIDS Fund has now built a separate house and facilities for the girls so that they've got more room, and no more long queues in the morning trying to use the toilet and the bathroom before heading off to school.

The houses don't have chimneys, cooking fires are inside and (hopefully) the smoke goes out the windows.

To make things easier and to reduce the risk of accident, we've just built a stand-alone brick kitchen and equipped it with gas stoves and some solid stainless steel cooking pots.

Now that water's back on hand, washing day is a big job when there's 32 youngsters to cater for.

In Mid October, President Bingu wa Mutharika declared the whole Malawi nation a "disaster area" appealing for international help to feed about half of the country's 11 million people who face starvation.

We've sent money to the Searchlight Care Organisation to enable it to buy fertiliser and hybrid maize seeds just as soon as there's a sign of rain.

We've also bought extra land so that the Australian Primary School..which hopefully will open next January...will have room to grow