Our Story
In the beginning Denis had the dream of opening an orphanage with the possibility of early childhood education. Because there were many difficulties to make this dream come true, Denis decided to start with a nursery school, offering lessons for those who needed it most – children with the most limited resources, coming from an impoverished background. His dream was to lead those children into a sustainable and independent future.
Because he didn’t get a lot of financial support, he started with only 3 classrooms and about 60 children.
In the beginning, there were no toilets, no playground and no office. The food was prepared in a private kitchen and three children had to share one plate of food, because there weren’t enough dishes to serve all the children. Water had to be brought from a tap of the neighbors by buckets and there was no possibility of washing hands or drinking water.
With the help of volunteers and donations Flowers Children’s Centre was able to build two more rooms, three toilets, a storage room, different play equipment and a school kitchen. Lots of other volunteers helped to get the buildings painted and even a vegetable garden was layed out.
The next step was to think of how to keep the project alive in the long run. The idea of creating a sponsorship program was born. We calculated the budget of Flowers Children’s Centre and started „Mimi na Wewe“ – „Me and You“. For only 10€/ 10$ a month people could sponsor a child to visit Flowers Children’s Centre. These costs would cover the teachers salary, food for the kids and also the rent we had to pay for the school’s ground.
In the next step, the website was created and we got a cooperation with „Thomas Engel-Stiftung“, a foundation, which was willing to collect the donations. Everything went well so far J
After a while it was getting difficult to keep collecting donations. That’s when we started to think of other possibilities to get an income for Flowers Children’s Centre. End of 2017 we then opened our own volunteers hostel : „Maua Hostel“ – „Flowers Hostel“. The idea was to give volunteers the opportunity of cheap accommodation and boarding, on the other hand the income should help covering the costs for Flowers Children’s Centre. In addition we would have our „own“ volunteers to help and assist us at school and we would not be dependent on other organizations anymore.