Hi Everyone!
I love August – one less layer of clothing, sunny days, chilly nights, sweet oranges appear in the market, mould disappears from cupboards and the local corn fields are almost ready for harvest.
The three-week holiday gave all the children (except Std 4) and most of the staff a well earned break and all the fundis (tradesmen) a chance to do all the maintenance jobs around the school – ceiling boards were put up in the classrooms, walls were painted, lawns mowed, gardens weeded, desks and chairs repaired, storage rooms built, security walls built and hundreds of other little jobs that get put on hold until the time and space is available were sorted out. For many of us here holiday time is a chance to get a lot of work done!
Another group that didn’t get much of a break was the Std 4 pupils and staff who came in every morning for four hours of intensive tuition in preparation for their big offical government exam at the end of the year. As most of you will remember, this is the first of the important government exams that the children face and this year with 126 sitting for it we are determined to do as well as last year (3rd highest aggregate out of 204 schools in the district), if not better! From all reports we are well on target thanks to our Academic Master, Mr Nestory, and his great team of teachers and dedicated pupils.
And talking of great teams and dedication, we had an amazing Rotary RAWCS group working like beavers on projects at the school this month – more on them later.
The Moshono Campus Secondary School has started!
On Monday 31st July the builders arrived with tape measures, string and wooden markers and by the end of the day the banana plantation that was, became the building site for the first phase of our first secondary school!
Check out our posh set of drawings below done by our local architect, John Kraft! Ten classrooms, two seminar rooms, two computer labs, staff rooms, offices and an amenities block! By December these will be a reality and in January the classrooms will be in temporary use by the junior school and Std 5 where we will have to school them until the second campus is built. And the new 170 children we will be enrolling next year will start classes in the current primary school in January. We start the long and intensive testing process to find these children next month so I’ll be able to update you on our progress in the next newsletter.
It’s going to require a bit of juggling until 2009 by which time our current Std 5 pupils will be ready for Form 1 secondary school and we have the new second primary campus at Usa River ready. Then three streams of each primary class will be transferred there and the secondary school will revert back to its original purpose.
If I had any reservations about the building being ready for January they have certainly been allayed in the last few weeks.
Below, you can see the result of the first week of work – the bananas appear to be trying to escape their inevitable demise!
Within three weeks, the first classroom walls were up and the burnt bricks were standing by for use on the outside walls, which will continue the style of the primary school.
And as I write the formwork is almost in place (below) for the ground floor roof slab. Just watch this space next month to follow the progress!
Special Effects!
Remember I told you about the accommodation block that we’ve been building so that the visitor groups don’t have to stay in tents and four long-term volunteers have some personal space? Well, I got stopped by a man in town who told me about the special effect he can do on buildings and as he is trying to get his business off the ground, he would like to put the finish on one of our buildings to advertise his skill – it’s certainly eye-catching … looks like we’ve blanket stitched the walls together!
New Land Appeal – Update!
The arrows are moving! More money has been pledged, more money received and we’ve been able to make another payment this month. So below we have another photo of a very happy and relieved Mr Moses, the representative of the family who sold us the land and is very kindly allowing us to pay off our debt over a year or so.
In case you haven’t been following carefully or have just joined us, we are buying 30 acres of the most beautiful land about 15 kms out of Arusha towards Mt Kilmanjaro on which we are going to build another campus. This campus will open in 2009 and offer free, high quality education to another 1,000 children … with your help!
To raise the money for the land we have been ‘selling’ 30 square metres of land for AU$100 or for US$100 you can ‘own’ a block of 40 square yards. You will receive a ‘land title’ certificate, a photograph of the land and regular updates on the progress of the payments and development. So many of you have taken the opportunity to help us in this way and I’m excited to report that we have moved from over 3000 blocks of land to sell down to approximately 400 blocks left. So if you have been thinking about it for Christmas presents or just for the thrill of having your own ‘land title’ as a reminder of your participation in ‘fighting poverty through education’ then get in quick!
Culture Day
What do you do when you’ve planned the school timetable for the year and discover that there is a public holiday on the day before the last day of term? How do you entice them back to school for one day before they disappear for 3 weeks … or do you just give everyone an extra day off? No way – there are too many public holidays here as it is! Sports carnival? Nah … done that. Fun Day? Nah … been there. Music Day? Excellent idea … but how do we get everyone involved when we only have 50 recorders (NOOOOOO!!!!), 10 drums (AHHHHHHH!!!) and a bunch of combs with tissue paper (EEEEEEOW!!!) – you add traditional dancing, face painting, poetry, games, bead making, pottery, chapatti making, Maasai dress, and you get Miss Emily our dedicated music teacher to organise it all! And what a hit it was! I would say it was one of the best days since the school began.
All the staff and children were organised into a programme that required military precision, strict timing and preparation that Emily started months in advance. And, by golly, all her hard work, badgering, cajoling, begging, chastising and planning paid off – almost 700 children and over 60 staff were organised into a combination of activities that had them fully occupied all day.
If they were grumbling about doing pottery, by the end of the session they were up to their eyebrows in clay and proudly displaying their first … um … pot … thing. And the chapatti lesson started slowly as kneading dough is pretty boring but when told they could eat the results, it picked up the pace. The beading workshop was popular as, although the fiddley little beads were frustrating to work with, the thrill of watching earrings and bangles emerge was worth going cross-eyed for.
As a maths teacher I was quite intrigued by Bao, the traditional East African game that Damasi and his friends are learning to play below.
And don’t all kids love any excuse to get their hands dirty! Below, Eunice, Innocent, Marcus and Hezron learn to make a bowl…or something!
Barnaba, Debora and Karisma had had so much fun dressing up as Maasai they just had to show Miss Karin, our sponsorship Co-ordinator.
I hope our ‘big kids’, Mr Peter and Mr George, let their students have a go on the drums eventually!
Oh, it’s a mess … but the chapattis were worth it!
Such a cool idea – Morgan and Reginald have learnt a great use for recycled bottle tops … and I can assure you they are all from soda bottles!
Barnaba, second from the right, looked quite keen on the idea of choosing Jackline as a Maasai bride in the traditional costume class with Ms Ndeenengo (right). Cypriana, on the other hand, could be less enthusiastic as she missed out on the beautiful headdress…
Below Aneti found the traditional beadwork a breeze once Miss Diana explained how to thread the beads onto the wire. They will present the earrings and bangles to our visitors when they’re finished.
Miss Colethe and the junior classes put on a wonderful display of traditional dancing to the delight of the whole school. Don’t they look gorgeous!
Mr Andrew’s patience and steady hand transformed Gloria’s cheeks into works of art … but it tickled!
Thanks to the RAWCS Rotary volunteer team!
I introduced you to Brian and the gang last month when they were half way through their work trip. Well, when they got back from their well earned and adventure filled safari (all 17 of them still intact) they got straight back to work.
The roof went up on the mechanics garage; they constructed and painted the library bookstands; the impassable road to the boarding school site had the huge holes filled in; they sweated over the collating of the report cards, updated the students’ files and because they still had time on their hands they whipped up a shed in a few days. In this we will be storing the 170 desks and chairs that the RAWCS team arriving next month will be making for the new classes next year.
I think I should get them back when we start building the new campus – it would probably be up in a month!! They were an amazing team – not just for the work they did, they were great fun to have around as well. A huge THANK YOU! to all of you.
This is how it was:
This is how it is:
You want a shed?
We’ll build you a shed!
But it wasn’t just the guys that grabbed the power tools! Robyn was an expert on the sanding machine by the time she got to the 18th book holder – the 100th she could have done in her sleep!
While some of the team were working with sunglasses on, others were helping in administration. The end of term reports had to be collated and that meant that about 8000 strips of paper had to be sorted – each child gets two reports (one in English for the sponsor and one in Kiswahili for their parents or guardians) and each report had eight sections! Goodness knows how we would have managed without all the willing pairs of hands to help us prepare for report giving day.
If Lyn and Helen thought they’d got an easy indoor job they quickly realised their mistake – updating the files for the school government inspectors scheduled to arrive in a few months was trickier than mastering the welding machine. But their huge effort could mean the difference between us getting an A rating and a B. Bless you both!
Thanks to our volunteers
The time has come to say good-bye to Miss Helen from the USA who has been teaching at the school for just over eighteen months. Helen has been a great Science and English teacher and we wish her the best of luck as she returns to her home in Seattle and a new teaching job. I don’t think her Bao skills will be much use there but you never know…
Well, what can we say about our Miss Lucy. Lucy came to Arusha to visit friends, discovered the school, offered to volunteer for a few months … and that was almost a year ago! Every few months she said she was leaving but luckily for us she postponed ‘for a few more months’. Now, she did say she was definitely leaving in the holidays but I noticed she was still assisting in the art room last time I looked so who knows, maybe she’s not leaving after all! If this is a premature ‘good bye’ there will be a lot of staff who will be delighted to have her continue to assist in their classes. And the kids will be happy, too!
We are all going to miss Mr Paul’s amazing guitar playing and remarkable singing. But when he wasn’t amusing us with renditions of Beatle’s songs or moving us to tears with beautiful ballads, he was a great computer and PE teacher. We look forward to his return someday.
Thank you so much for wanting to share our news and I hope you remember us in your prayers.
Big hugs! Gemma