The Rotary Club of Wicklow is organising a table quiz and dinner to help students from the Dominican College Wicklow to raise funds for the School of St Jude in Tanzania.
It may be over 11,000km from Wicklow town to Tanzania, but students from the local Dominican College are making an enormous contribution in bringing both countries together through a visionary educational project. Tanzania has endemic poverty and is unable to provide its children with a quality education as the government school system is overstretched and vastly under-resourced.
The School of St Jude was formed in 2002 and educates disadvantaged students. When they finish their education they then return to their communities to demonstrate educational leadership in Tanzania. The school receives no State funding so depends entirely on voluntary donations. A few years ago students from Dominican College decided to help by raising €3,000 each month which goes directly to the school.
The Rotary Club of Wicklow has supported the Dominican students fundraising campaign for St. Jude's since it was initiated. On Friday, March 23, Rotary is hosting a table quiz in the Grand Hotel at 7.30 p.m. in collaboration with the Dominican students and their supporters to increase its funding.
'We urge people in Wicklow to come out and support this visionary project and also learn about the remarkable work carried out by local students,' said Pat Kerr, President of Wicklow Rotary. 'They have shown remarkable skills and initiative in supporting this worthwhile educational venture and we are delighted to support them.'
Teacher John O'Brien said the school is extremely proud of the efforts of the Wicklow students.
'They have raised over €100,000 for the school of St Jude and also sponsor students in helping to give them an education and a chance in life that they would not otherwise have. Drawn from families who often live on less than €1 per day, the pupils of St Jude's are shining examples of what students can achieve when they are given the opportunity to receive a quality education.'
Those wishing to attend can contact John O'Brien on (0404) 68111 or (087) 6598309 or Pat Kerr at (086) 3398390. The Tickets are priced at €30 each or €120 for a team of four.
Michael Buchanan, Wicklow People (read the original article here).
Teaching of science and allied subjects, often short of the required number of teachers, got a boost in Arusha this week after Form VI graduates started teaching as volunteers.
At least 68 graduates from St. Jude school, one of the high profile and donor funded learning institutions here, on Monday began a year of service and started teaching at various government owned schools.
“The majority of them are teaching science and mathematics, key subjects urgently needed for a prosperous future for Tanzania,” the School’s founded Ms Gemma Sisia told The Citizen yesterday.
Photo supplied by Walford Anglican School for Girls
Sasha is a student of Walford Anglican School for Girls in Adelaide, South Australia. She was recently nominated in the prestigious Channel 9 Young Achiever Awards, for her dedication to fundraising for the sponsorship of Alice, also aged 10, in Standard 3 at The School of St Jude.
On Friday May 11, the inspiring young leader was presented with her nominee award by the Honourable Rachel Sanderson, Member of Parliament for Adelaide.
The Channel 9 Young Achiever Awards were established to recognise, encourage and reward the positive achievements of young South Australians, up to and including 29 years of age.
“I felt so proud and happy to help Alice,” said an overjoyed Sasha.
Sasha heard about The School of St Jude from her mother, Tamara, who had seen a segment featuring St Jude’s, on 60 Minutes Australia in 2016.
Keen to make a difference, and wanting to know that her donated funds would directly improve someone’s life, Sasha chose to fundraise for our school by sewing headbands and selling them, under the banner of ‘Headbands for Girls’ Education’. The Walford community has supported Sasha by helping her sell the headbands in the school.
“I am lucky to go to a good school. It is not fair that just because you are a girl, in some countries, you don’t get an education. I wanted to help a girl my own age and show them that we like the same things, even though we are around the other side of the world,” Sasha said.
Insightful and articulate, Sasha reflected upon words of wisdom from her grandmother, which helped inspire her to fight poverty through education.
“My grandmother always says knowledge is power and work makes life sweet. The more we learn, the more we understand each other.” Sasha’s grandmother has always told Sasha to be grateful for the education she is getting and how special it is to help change one girls life.
When Sasha signed up for sponsorship of Alice’s scholarship, she was pleased to learn that their shared favourite animal is a dog, and that Alice aspires to grow up and be a business leader.
Sasha’s mother and grandmother, couldn’t be more proud of Sasha’s efforts in helping provide opportunities for someone else’s daughter, on the other side of the world. It shows the power of kindness.
“I would like this to change one girl’s life and make a difference — everyone can make a difference if you just help a little. Education is the key to making change,” Tamara and her mother believe.
One day, Sasha says she dreams of meeting Alice in person.
“If I got to meet Alice, I would tell her that, ‘I’m so excited that I am helping to give you an education and I hope it helps you.’ I would really like to give her a hug.”
Sasha is a moral and intellectual leader of tomorrow, who is making a difference today. Like her, you can give a helping hand to one of Tanzania’s future leaders. Sponsor or donate during our 2018 Annual Appeal.
Graduate, teacher and future doctor, Dorice is wrapping up her Community Service Year as the sole biology teacher at Sombetini Secondary School.
In 2016, this young leader charmed Australians on tour with Gemma and captured the hearts of her students with her grace and resilience.
We caught up with Dorice to hear about her experience as a teacher.
How are you feeling now that your Community Service Year is coming to an end?
In some ways I feel really good, really excited because I know I am soon going to start another journey in my life. In other ways I feel very sad because of my students. I will really miss them! As you know there is a shortage of teachers and when I leave I don’t know if they are going to have another biology teacher.
What has been the most challenging part of your job?
There is a very big difference, a very huge difference between government school and my education. At St Jude’s we have small classes, few students and enough teachers. We have electricity in classes, computers, and food at every mealtime. Here it is different, the classes have no electricity, and there are too many students – the books are also hard to get.
Most of the students when I came for the first time – they never knew English, so it was very hard. You know biology, it is all in English. Teaching them in English and then translating in Swahili, it was a very difficult thing. The differences now with my students learning in English is huge. Most of them are putting their hands up and speaking so much English.
Did you think you could master all this, at the beginning?
For the first time, I was scared. I went home the first day, I told my parents, “I don’t think I can do it”, because it is very hard to be in front of a class of 60 students. My parents they were advising me and giving me hope saying “you can do it”. So I said “OK, I will have to do it and do it will all my heart because I chose it and I want to help these students”. Now I feel so good. I feel so proud of myself!
How do you think this year has changed you as a person?
Actually I feel like I am really grown up now because of dealing with different types of students, different personalities, and other teachers who are much older than me. Now I know I can face different situations and I can make tough decisions. So I feel like I have changed a lot.
I feel I can live and change to any kind of environment. Life in government schools is very hard but I can do it. For example, I can now stay for a long time without eating and still perform my responsibilities, which is a good thing actually.
How do your students feel about you leaving for university?
They say how much they will miss me because the way I live with them and treat them is more like a big sister. It’s different with the other teachers. When my students have problems they come and tell me and if I am capable I will always help them. They say when I leave they don’t know how they are going to find some answers in their lives, especially girls, they are more comfortable talking to me.
What is your proudest accomplishment as a teacher?
Now I can see most of my students have a real goal in their life. Last year when I came, I asked my class, “who wants to be doctors?” They were all quiet. “Who wants to be teachers?” They were all quiet. They didn’t understand themselves, what they wanted, or how they could think about their future.
The way I talked to them and advised them over this year I think is why they come to me and tell me, “in university I want to study this” or “in VETA college I want to study this”. So I feel like somehow they have seen what is going on in their lives and how they can have some power in that through education.
As a journalist, it is not often you get to see a tangible example of the effect your work can have.
Sometimes you hope that a particular story will achieve something — expose an injustice or bring about much-needed change, but most of the time, the world goes on as it was.
So getting an invitation to return to Tanzania's School of St Jude — the subject of an Australian Story program I produced in 2005 — turns out to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I am here because about 4,000 Australian families signed up to sponsor children at the school after watching the program and I have been invited as a special guest to witness the graduation ceremony of the first batch of students to complete high school.
It is a strange and humbling experience to be welcomed back as if I am the Bob Geldof of the School of St Jude.
"What's it like to see the school you built, Ben?" asks Gemma Sisia, who founded the school after moving from her home on a farm near Armidale, NSW, to Africa at the age of 22.
Since I was last here, the school has grown from housing 500 students to nearly 2,000.
"Those sponsors who signed up after watching Australian Story are the backbone of the school," she says.
"Time and again, I have said that St Jude's would not be the success it is today without the efforts of Australian Story."
Actor Rebel Wilson quietly signed up after seeing the program — several years passed before a young staffer in the St Jude's office recognised the sponsor's name as a star of film and television in Hollywood.
In the days leading up to the graduation ceremony, I keep meeting more and more sponsors who can trace their involvement back to the Australian Story broadcast.
About 70 sponsors have made the trip from Australia to be part of the ceremony, which will be the biggest celebration in the school's history.
I join one of them on a visit to the home of the student she sponsors.
Elizabeth Lekind, 20, lives with her older sister Naomi, Naomi's two young children and their two cows in a small cement house not far from the school.
Elizabeth has pledged to become a doctor, after a dramatic episode while doing volunteer work in a local hospital.
She encountered a woman lying in agony but receiving no attention from the doctors and no medicine.
She raised some money from friends and neighbours and came back the next day with the medicine — but the bed was empty.
"They said she had passed away that night. So I came home crying and that was the day I decided to want to be a doctor," she says.
"I want to help people. From that day, I pursued medicine."
Elizabeth Lekind believes Gemma Sisia has already transformed the future for her.
Without the School of St Jude, she would almost certainly be "married off" by now with several children, because her family could not afford higher education.
"I see her as a mirror to my future. Gemma came with a dream of providing free quality education to poor children, and she dreamt of bringing up the future leaders of Tanzania," she says.
"Many people would say that Gemma is a saviour. A saint."
On a second home visit, I meet eight-year old Emmanuel Kiwale in what can only be described as the slum of Arusha.
His family of five live in a tiny one-room wooden shack with no toilet.
Emmanuel is one of 104 St Jude's students who currently have no sponsor — another 165 are only part-sponsored.
His mother Mariam Omari says she is praying that God will send someone, a sponsor for her son, so that he can continue to study all the way to university and get a good job.
That would improve all of their lives.
As graduation day dawns, Gemma takes to the stage, her voice cracking with emotion.
"It seems like only yesterday that you enrolled. I remember when we were issuing your uniforms," she says, to thunderous applause.
"I remember when you got sick. I remember when you sat your first national exams. You are the reason for this very special day."
As celebrations wind up with the presentation of the giant graduation cake — a cake that turns out to be a decorated, barbecued goat — I feel my faith in humanity being restored.
To be a part of this project where so many people have worked together for a worthwhile goal has been an uplifting experience.
As I say to the students when it is my time to speak, it will be fascinating to watch their progress over the next 20 or 30 years.
What if the future Tanzanian president, groundbreaking scientist or world famous musician is in this room today?
And so now, if my children or future grandchildren ever ask whether I have done anything to make the world a better place, I have a ready answer.
It is my small part in the success of the School of St Jude.
In Tanzania, where a cornfield once lay, now stands a school.
Where kids formerly had no better prospects than minding cows, 2,000 children are getting a great education.
It's dress rehearsal for the inaugural graduation ceremony at the School of St Jude in Arusha, Tanzania, and the formidable Gemma Sisia is trying to convince me she has pulled back from supervising every detail at the school she founded 13 years ago. But with five days to go before the big event, it doesn't look that way. "I don't want to see any wiggly lines like snakes," she instructs the 61 students who are making an untidy approach to the stage and singing too softly for Sisia's liking. "Do you not know the Tanzania national anthem? Prove it to me!" They crank up the volume. "Beautiful. Excellent. Perfect!"
Every one of the 61 students graduating is expected to go on to university and every one of their sponsors – 70 of whom are also here from Australia – have vowed to continue their financial support. One of them is Sharon Smith, 60, a Brisbane businesswoman now on her second visit. After watching the program and hearing Sisia speak at a fundraiser in Brisbane, she offered to sponsor ten St Jude students. "I owned a childcare centre. I was making good money, I could afford it," she says. "I get great satisfaction out of it."
The children start here at the age of seven and graduate, if all goes well, at 20. "It makes me happy to think that these children over here are getting a similar education to my granddaughter in Australia and can do just as well as anyone in the world now," says Smith. However, there are still some funding issues at the school.
Around 150 of the students currently do not have a sponsor, and 165 are only half-sponsored. growing up on a fine-wool merino farm outside Guyra, near Armidale in northern NSW, Gemma Rice was a self-described "challenge junkie". As the only girl in a family of eight children, she quickly learnt to compete with her brothers when it came to mustering sheep and riding horses. According to her mother, Sue Rice, she became fearless and fiercely determined. "She was always very definite in her views, even as a little girl," says Rice. "I don't think you could ever talk Gemma into or out of anything."
To say that Sue and her husband, Basil, who died in 2004, were a deeply religious Catholic family would be an understatement. They converted their dining room into a prayer room, complete with crucifix, candles and statues of Jesus. Out in the paddocks, among the sheep, motorbikes and cattle dogs, they constructed their own Stations of the Cross, depicting scenes from the crucifixion of Christ. It was instilled in the children that there was more to life than just having fun.
"My parents put a huge emphasis on our education and I subconsciously absorbed that," says Sisia. "In doing so, I felt that children from poor families should also have access to a good education." From an early age, it was always in the back of her mind that she'd like to become a nun. "I was quite prepared to live in poverty and chastity," Sisia told me in an interview at the property back in 2005. She discussed the idea with her school principal, who thought she was perhaps "too headstrong" to be a nun, and advised her to get a university qualification instead.
After gaining a degree in biochemistry and genetics at Melbourne University – and, for good measure, a diploma in education – Sisia, at 22 and on the advice of a friend, set off for Uganda to work in a convent school. But the idea of becoming a nun or missionary went astray just a few months after her arrival when she took a safari on the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania. Her driver was one Richard Sisia. "There's nothing like falling in love in the Serengeti," she says now. "It's very romantic, with all the animals and lions around."
In the quiet, 27-year-old Tanzanian, she saw kindness, calmness, strength and a sense of adventure. The attraction was mutual. "We loved each other immediately," says Richard. "But I was scared to tell her anything because I was employed by her, and my job was to show [her] animals, not talk about love."
Back at the convent in Uganda, Gemma tried to forget about the holiday romance. She'd given Richard a deliberately vague address when she left him but, three months later, he embarked on an 1100-kilometre quest to find her, travelling for two days and two nights on a bus to reach the central Ugandan town of Masaka.
After three days spent asking around for the mzungu (white) woman, he found her at the convent school. "I was like, 'Thank god I found her,' " he says. "We had big hugs and talked. I spent three more days with her and we talked about being together for life," he says. Gemma's notion of becoming a nun dissolved.
Explaining to her family that she was going to marry a Tanzanian and live her life in Africa wasn't so easy. They pictured her carrying water on her head and living in a mud hut. Also, for Sue Rice, the idea of her being with a local man was confronting. "That was definitely a hard thing for mum to deal with," Sisia's brother Patrick told Australian Story. "Another country, another culture and, I suppose, the colour."
"We were all worried about her but we prayed about it," Rice told me. "And when she really did say she was going to marry him, it was a shock because as a mother, you worry about your daughter's safety." She maintains that Richard's skin colour never worried her; it was Africa that disturbed her.
Sisia had already started collecting $5 a month from friends and family members to sponsor two girls at the convent school in Uganda. On visits home to Australia, she spoke at Rotary clubs and churches about her experiences, with the result that more and more people joined the sponsorship scheme. She began sending money to other Ugandan schools, but was frustrated to learn that some of it was going missing. An idea started to take shape in her head: why not start her own school and so be sure the money was going where it was needed?
The problem was solved when Richard's father, Daniel – a senior Masai man who'd been educated by missionaries and become a vet – offered to donate a small block of land. Though Westernised and middle class, he worked with the Masai people in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area. "He said, 'Gemma, why are you helping all these Ugandan kids when we've got much poorer children in Tanzania?'‰Û " she recalls. " 'If I give you a piece of land, would you build a school for the poor?' "
In 2000, Armidale Central Rotary Club sent over 13 volunteers to construct the first block of classrooms. Richard and Gemma were married in a Masai-Catholic ceremony at the school in 2001 and the School of St Jude opened its doors in January, 2002. It was with a wry sense of humour that Gemma chose the name St Jude: "St Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. A girl from Guyra trying to build a school in Africa? That's a serious hopeless case!" The motto "Fight poverty through education" was suggested by her mother.
Initially, the school was staffed by an unlikely trio of volunteers: Sisia, who'd never run a school; Angela Bailey, who at 19 had only just completed an early childhood diploma in Sydney; and Kim Saville, 48, who'd previously worked as a Sydney casting agent. "We got away with a lot in the early days because of our naivety," says Saville.
The school grew rapidly. Within three years it had 500 students and was ranked third out of 204 schools in the district. It employed 100 local staff, half of them teachers, and a team of builders who were constantly adding extra classrooms. A $15 million stroke of luck arrived in 2005 when American philanthropists Gordon and Helen Smith visited Tanzania for a safari and decided to give their support to a local school.
When they got to St Jude, they knew they'd found the one they were looking for. "Gemma wasn't here when we arrived, she was in Australia, but we were impressed that the school was operating fine without her," says their daughter, Cindy Skarbek. The Smiths offered to build a second St Jude campus in Arusha, doubling the school's size.
Every Saturday from August to December, hundreds of children line up at the school gates to compete for one of the 150 places on offer each year at various levels. To gain admission, there are just two criteria: the children must be bright and they must be poor. A "poverty check" involves several unscheduled visits to the child's house to check on their living conditions. And while it is a Christian-based school, 20 per cent of the students are Muslim and numerous tribes are represented. "Students are accepted based on brains and poverty, not sex, tribe or religion," says Sisia.
Today, every member of the teaching staff is Tanzanian. Students sit exams five times a year and those who do not achieve grades of at least 70 per cent are unable to stay at St Jude. It's a harsh policy, but one that's enforced not by Sisia but by the parent committee. "That's sustainability for you," she says. "Tanzanians disciplining Tanzanians."
Four years ago, Sisia stepped down as St Jude director to spend more time with her family. The Sisias' two oldest children, Nathaniel, 14, and Jacob, 12, go to boarding school in South Africa (they don't qualify for St Jude), leaving Isabella, 7, and Louisa, 3, at home. Gemma has also helped Richard relaunch his business, which offers 4WD trips through Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya.
The school's parent board asked her to come back because families were worried that without her the school could collapse. Standards were slipping, according to Fausta Alfayo, chairperson of the parent committee. "We want her there to do the push-push-pushing," says Alfayo.
As graduation day gets underway, Sisia takes to the stage. The students excitedly adjust their academic robes and hats, debating in rapid-fire Swahili whether the hats' tassel should hang to the left or right. Her voice cracking with emotion, Sisia welcomes Tanzania's deputy minister of education, parents, visitors – including her mother – and the students. "It seems like yesterday that you enrolled," she tells them.
"From today, I am a leader," affirms student representative Cecilia Collumbus. "We are all leaders. To everyone here today, we promise that we are going to leave a remarkable footprint on the future."
For each alumnus, that future begins with a year of community service, including three months of military service, followed by a "giving back" period of teaching in a Tanzanian government school, before going on to university. Judica Amon, 20, wants to study business. In offering her this education, Sisia has, she believes, saved her and other girls from early marriages and mundane lives: "We call this heaven and it is truly heaven compared to the government schools. It has changed our lives and opened up an opportunity for a great future."
In Tanzania, where a cornfield once lay, there now stands a school. Where kids formerly had no better prospects than minding cows, children are receiving a life-changing education. Sue Rice has no more doubts about her daughter's unexpected path in life, even as she recognises that Gemma is unlikely ever to return to Australia to live. "I am more than proud of what she has achieved," she tells me. "I am in awe of it."
