Hola and welcome to the thirty-third edition of F4TNEWS,

September has arrived. Spring is kind of in the air. We have had some nice days but also a few thunder storms with some good rain. We had our music festival planned for Sunday, but due to the weather, we had to postpone it. Hopefully, the sun comes out next Sunday.

We have been planning the event for a few months. It will involve bands, food, drink, kiddies castle, an art exhibition and a second-hand clothes stall. All money raised will go to the maintenance of the venue. Our food hall still has no windows and no tiles on the floor. We also have another classroom in the same situation. Hopefully, we can raise enough money to get some work done.

Valeria's husband Bernardo, and our art teacher Soledad won a grant to facilitate a series of workshops involving art and photography. The children have been taking photos with keyhole cameras that they have made. They have been developing them in a mobile dark room on a trailer that Bernardo has for his other photographic projects. The dark room doubles as a large key hole camera that projects an image (upside down) of what is outside on the wall of the dark room while you are inside it. Pretty cool experience for the kids. It will be great to see the results of that project.

We have had a bit of trouble with physical violence lately, but worse is the verbal and emotional abuse that goes on between the kids. You can't really blame them, they are only repeating the abuse that they receive in the home, physical and emotional. It doesn't seem to matter what kind of strategies we apply, the home environment just seems to be an influence that overpowers a lot of what we do. It won't stop us from trying though. Watch this space.

We made a vegetable tart with some chard from the garden last week. It is the kids favourite. One child ate nine portions. It has a dough base with a potato, chard, spinach and onion topping. Simple yet effective. Our broad beans are growing like champions! Standing up tall and strong like soldiers. Hopefully, we will have a feed of those shortly.

Valeria's father has been in the hospital. He has had a series of small strokes and the doctors are still searching for the cause of a very high white blood cell count. We are all thinking of the family and hope that Felipe has a fast recovery. 

That is all for now. Until next month.
 
Ben and the Food for Thought team.