The Mena Daycare is located in Addis Ababa the capital of Ethiopia. It was founded in May 2019 by a local named Zebenay, who used to work as a cook for my family. She has a passion for helping others in need. Zebenay lives close to a rubbish dump where many families live. She told my parents about the dump and about the amount of families that live there and call the rubbish dump their home.
She then went on to explain that she wanted to start a daycare, to help the mothers living by the dump to get jobs, and give the children a safe place where they can learn new things and to stay during the day.
The timing couldn’t have been more right since we were about to leave Ethiopia. A miracle happened where Zebenay found a good building for her daycare. My family and I helped her get the daycare up and running, provided her with some of the things she would need such as furniture and toys. We had one of our guards who is a very talented artist help out and paint the building along with my mother.
Before we knew it we had a daycare, and it has been a huge success. Now Zebenay has over 130+ kids that come to the Mena Daycare daily.
Zebenay, and some of the workers, playing their own version of Simon says.
Mena Daycare prepares all these kids for kindergarten, here are some of the kids that graduated from daycare. Zebenay along with the other women that run the daycare they teach to draw, write, and read, or at least learn the basics.
Some of the drawing and writing.
The painting on the wall behind the kids sleeping is also a tool they use to help teach the kids more words and expand their vocabulary.
With the Mena Daycare one of our main focuses is to teach the kids the basics of reading, and writing to prepare them for kindergarten. In this video you can see one of the workers helping one of the kids learn colours, and match the colours on the page with the different coloured bottle caps.