100 ABSTRACTS - NUMBER 42 AND MONO MONDAY

When I got up to go to the bathroom at 5:50 this morning, the sun was shining and I really thought it was going to be a beautiful day.  However when I woke up again at 7:45, everything had changed.  The rain was lashing down, the traffic was queued up in the road behind our house, the sky was grey, and when Mr HCB came upstairs to bring me my early morning cup of coffee, he was really fed up because he had intended working in the garden today.

I decided to take a few photographs through the window with the raindrops running down the window pane and then got back into bed and had a little fartknarkle with the photographs I had taken.  Well, what else can you do on a rainy Monday morning?

The rain has stopped at last and there is a little patch of blue sky, but it’s so wet out there now that I don’t think Mr HCB will be going out to do anything in the garden although he has now gone out to the greenhouse, just to “potter” he assures me.

This is number 42 in my 100 Abstracts Challenge for the Mamie Martin Fund, which helps young women and girls with their secondary education in North Malawi. Here is the story of another young lady who was helped by the Fund and her family:

STELLA : both her parents died while she was in primary school and her maternal grandparents took over the care of all the siblings, as happens so often in Malawi. Stella was selected to Karonga Girls’ Secondary School (KAGSS) in 2006, a boarding school. She travelled there and started Form 1 with only a fraction of the money needed for fees, as so many other children do. Stella was ‘chased’ from school to go home to fetch the rest of the fees. Again, this is not uncommon in Malawi. Stella’s grandparents did not have any more money so they sold their blankets and, after two weeks, raised enough money for the first term at KAGSS. By term 2 the school had seen the poverty of Stella’s family and she was awarded a Mamie Martin Fund bursary, for the rest of her time at the school. 

Stella secured a place to study nursing at Kamuzu Nursing College in Lilongwe. Again, she attended without money for fees and again was ‘chased’. She was then awarded a bursary which provided her with money for fees and some expenses, completing that study in 2016 and became a nursing officer in the paediatric surgery and intensive care unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.

Now married and with a one-year old son, Joseph, in February 2020, Stella was selected as part of a small group to spend 6 months in Norway on a professional exchange programme with Oslo University Hospital.

Stella says “I recognise how great is my God; I am a Christian who believes that everything I am going through is because of God’s grace and love.”

This abstract is also a “two for one” today because the mono Monday theme is something beginning with “S”, so this fits the bill perfectly because after a little fartnarkling with the SuperimposeX app, it is a big Swirl.  I have put the colour version in as an extra.

“Sometimes the greatest thing 
     to come out of all your hard work 
          isn’t what you GET for it, 
               but what you BECOME for it.”
Steve Maraboli

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MaureenIles