You may have heard that our fws eco-friendly, early learning children's villages are a blueprint; fws aim to see these villages operating in many developing countries.

Our first project is Kesho Leo children's village in Arusha, Tanzania, East Africa. Why? Because Arusha is the place where all five of our founding committee lived (during our volunteering stints), and in setting up fws, it was decided that we would only build children’s villages in areas where at least one of us had lived so that we had local knowledge to work with and local support for our projects.

Where to next? Possibly...

Southern Sudan 2010

Since returning from Arusha in 2003, two of our committee members have had much contact with the newly arrived Sudanese community in Australia. Anne has taught Sudanese children, designing appropriate school curriculums for them and has worked closely with the Sydney Sudanese community, while Kelsey has worked with young Sudanese women, running support groups and individual social support in the Western suburbs of Melbourne.

Via updates from Anne and Kels, the fws team remain acutely aware of the situation in Sudan. Southern Sudan, in particular, is currently recovering from years of civil war, and are looking towards rebuilding their lives and creating a robust new future. We hope a fws children’s village could contribute to rebuilding Southern Sudan alongside the current and coming generations of Sudanese.

As a starting point, fws have linked with a Sudanese NGO called South Sudan Educate Girls (SSEG). SSEG have been asked by the Southern Sudanese government to establish some form of education for girls in Southern Sudan, as the civil-war children in this area have not had access to education for over 20 years. SSEG have called on fws to assist their organisation with advice on sustainability and fundraising. SSEG would also love to see an fws children's village as a part of their project in the Aweil region in Southern Sudan.

Given fws has made a commitment to only establish our children’s villages in locations where at least one of our team has lived for a minimum of six months, we are excited to announce that Anne has committed to teach at the new SSEG school in Aweil, Southern Sudan for 12 months in 2009.

If fws commits to building a children's village in Aweil, Anne's year teaching there, will have given her enough time to establish the grass-roots level relationships that fws would need to begin our second children's village in Southern Sudan in 2010.

So that’s the plan...next stop is possibly Southern Sudan!

If not, or thereafter? Well, we have also been approached by NGOs in South Africa, Afghanistan and Cambodia to build our villages. As fws moves forward, it is our hope to gather enough committed, long-term volunteers to enable us to look at going into these developing countries to assist. Naturally, we will remain committed to our ideals of establishing sustainable children’s villages only in areas where we have lived and have garnered the support of the local people and NGOs. That way, we can ensure we are building the capacity of the community as well as giving another group of children food, water, shelter, health, education, welfare and big bright futures.