The Guernsey Overseas Aid Commission have made the charity a wonderful grant of £40,643 to help with the building of a workshop and classrooms at the Secondary School.  We plan to have the building in use for the new school year in September.  Thank you Guernsey!

Guernsey-press.com Article

EXAM results in a Sierra Leone school have greatly improved thanks to help from the Guernsey Overseas Aid Commission.

Children at Peninsula Secondary School in the Waterloo District, near Sierra Leone’s capital city Freetown, are taking the national basic education certificate examination and gaining much better results due to the science and home economics laboratories built in the past two years.

When Sue and Laurie Read first visited the school soon after the civil war in Sierra Leone ended in 2003, they were so impressed by the staff and parents’ determination to restart their school that they decided to do all they could to help. Since then, the Waterloo Schools Charity has repaired classrooms, added new buildings, dug wells and provided toilets.

Mrs Read has just returned from a visit to the school, where three new laboratories have been erected with help from the GOAC. She said children loved using the new laboratories, cooking on the electric and gas cookers, using the sewing machines and doing experiments in the science lab.

‘During the 12-year civil war, buildings were burnt out and children could only learn from a few books and from what the teachers told them. Now they love to do real cooking and tailoring,’ she said.

‘They used to have no chance to do science experiments, even though there is a compulsory practical exam in the national examinations. Now they do practical work throughout the three years before taking their exam.’

Sierra Leone is rated as one of the poorest countries in the world by the United Nations. Only one in four children go to secondary school and the schools themselves are desperately short of equipment and classrooms.

Thanks to a grant from the GOAC in 2007, the school has set up a computer studies room with 40 computers, installed a generator to supply electricity and employed a computer-trained teacher and one for technical and vocational studies so both subjects can be added to the curriculum.

In addition to the new facilities, over the past three years children have also been given textbooks of their own and access to a library.

Each year has seen school furniture, books, stationery and exercise books being sent out, while a donation of used computers has enabled the school to start teaching computer studies and link by satellite to school programmes from South Africa, greatly improving the standard of education.

The two-storey science building has been in full use for 18 months and the charity is now raising funds to build workshops to teach building trade skills. There is a desperate need for vocational education so the country can develop its own economy and become less dependent on others.

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