Realising future plans for the school

I have been very silent for the last month because I have been in the UK, with a small detour to Ireland, looking for help for Cece Primary School.  During that time, Google refused to recognise me as I was in the ‘wrong place’ and on the ‘wrong computer’, making it impossible for me to edit my blog. 

I have been particularly looking for funding for the construction of a purpose-built school for which a local chief donated a large piece of land.  At the moment the land is a sea of grass as we had not managed to raise the finances to build on it. 

Construction of the new school is very urgent for several reasons. 

1) At the moment we are in a loaned building which only has room for three classes; next year we intend to have four classes and there simply isn’t room.

2) The owner of the current building wants us to leave so he can make use of his building himself. 

3) The chief donated the land to us several months ago and is getting impatient to see action being taken.  He has warned us that if we do not start to build soon he will take the land back. 

I am delighted to tell you that wonders happened, thanks to my former parish priest.  I spoke at all Sunday Masses one weekend.  A collection was taken of over £1000, and several parishioners have been in contact and donated substantially since then.  He also introduced me to the trustees of a charity called the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund.  Cece Primary School fully meets SDCF’s criteria for funding, which is Africa, children and poverty.  After telling them about the school, they kindly agreed to allow us to make use of their charity status so that we can reclaim 25% taxes on donations made by UK tax-payers via the Gift Aid scheme.  This will be done by asking donors to fill in a Gift Aid form and send future donations to the Sean Devereux account instead of my account.  The trustees also decided to make a donation from the fund of £5000 towards the school construction. 

Many thanks to Father John Horn, the parish of St Barnabas in East Molesey and the trustees of the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund.  Thanks also to David Wolton of the Sudan Volunteer Programme was also a valuable support as he helped me to meet some potentially very useful future contacts.  Finally, thanks to Peter and Judith Leonard in Ireland, who have also helped tremendously by donating a directory of potential donors and allowing me to speak to interested people at their home.  They and one of their friends made donations to the school.  The Leonards have been very active in the Nimule area in the past and therefore have a great interest in helping in the area generally.

I also met Pauline, a lady who is keen to come and spend a couple of months at the school helping with teaching the younger children next year.  She said, ‘I have always wanted to volunteer in Africa’.  Pauline is an experienced early years teacher.  This, of course, is highly dependent on what happens here in Nimule in the meantime, as I have no wish to put her in danger.

In short, God smiled on my trip.

I have now arrived back in Nimule.  People have welcomed me with almost literal open arms, starting with the motorcycle taxi driver at the border who drove me back home.  The cry of ‘Welcome back!’ or ‘You were lost!’ greets me at every turn, which makes me feel very much appreciated.

As mentioned in my last blog post, due to the civil war situation which reached new heights in July causing a huge exodus of at least 200,000 people to the refugee camps in Uganda, all schools apart from Cece Primary School closed.  The majority of our own pupils and staff also fled.  We therefore started a temporary Open Door policy to allow those children remaining in Nimule to continue to attend school.  We employed two new teachers and two new cooks to replace those who had left. 

I am glad to say that things are calmer in Nimule now.  People are starting to drift back from the refugee camps.  Schools are gradually reopening, so we are no longer the only school.  I expect the unregistered children taken in through our open door policy to be able to return to their original schools very shortly, leaving space for those children who are formally registered and meet the school’s official criteria of families with HIV/AIDS, other disabilities and orphans, particularly those unable to attend other schools due to lack of school fees.  The school will be able to return to a more normal teaching schedule and start preparing the children for end of year exams in December, although it will be difficult to catch up.

I went straightaway to visit the school on the day I got back.  I found that school numbers had risen to nearly 60, although many children are still from other schools rather than our officially registered ones.  However, it was good to see quite a few of our original pupils who have returned from the refugee camps.

HUMAES (who are a local NGO partnering with Cece) are putting together a final building plan for the new school in consultation with experienced builders and updating our bill of quantity which we originally wrote in January.  We currently envisage a school with several blocks.  One block of four classrooms, another for kitchen, food storage and dining hall (doubling as school hall) and a block for a library and school office.  I have a large number of donated books, which need to be made accessible to staff and children; the library is therefore essential.  We also want to order desks and chairs, which up until now have been a dream too far.  There is a huge amount of space, so we will plant fruit trees, reserve an area for growing vegetables and allocate a space for a football pitch (a much loved sport here).  At a later stage we want to create an outside play area with play equipment and also build another classroom block. 

As I am sure you can tell, I am feeling very positive about the future of the school.  As mentioned in my last two blog posts, the local population are deeply unstable.  They have had to uproot and flee so many times that now they flee almost unthinkingly and out of habit.  There is a serious need to demonstrate stability.  Building our school will send a message to the locals, and particularly to those most impoverished that they should stop running and let their children gain that all-important education so they can help their families and local community in the future.  When they see that we have been building while they were ‘running’, I hope they will stop and think. 

Please can I ask for your help to make our plans a reality.  A small monthly donation will help a lot with our day to day running costs of staff wages, feeding, pencils etc. Larger lump sums will go towards construction costs.  If you have already been donating to the school, please make sure you cancel your payments to my account.  In either case please email me on rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk so I can send you the Gift Aid form.  This applies whether or not you are a tax-payer.  You will need to set up a new order to the Sean Devereux account, whose details are on the Gift Aid form. 

Please circulate this post as widely as possible.  I have set up a Facebook page for the school.  It can be found by searching for @nimule on Facebook.  I will try to keep it updated regularly, but this is dependent on internet access, which is sketchy and expensive in Nimule.