End of school year

I am very happy to let you know that we have come to the end of our most successful year so far.



Children look at their exam results

This year’s end of year examination results are the best since the school began in 2015.  70% of children passed.  There are two reasons for the improvement.  Firstly, the situation this year has been much more stable than last year.  Not nearly so many children have been taken to the refugee camps, so we have been able to teach most of them right through the school year without interruption.  Secondly, we have sub-divided and streamed two of the classes (pre-primary and Primary 3) where there were huge differences in academic levels.  The result was that some children who were really out of their depth at the start of the year have caught up or are at least starting to make headway.

Parents and children with Pascalina, my co-founder (in green cap)

The big news that I shared with parents was that I am stepping down as headteacher in favour of a teacher named Patrick Gore from the end of this term.  Patrick has been with us for two terms and is a very experienced, enthusiastic and committed teacher.  He is also a local pastor, so he has good leadership skills.  I have been on the lookout for a replacement for myself since the beginning as Cece Primary School is intended to be a South Sudanese school, not one which is an entirely foreign intervention.  This will make the school more stable in the long term.  However I will not be leaving.  I will continue as a teacher and also with my fundraising efforts, after a break of one term to allow Patrick to get his feet under the table.

Parents and children leave clutching marked papers

Last Friday we held an end of year celebration, complete with a drama by some of the children on the subject of the importance of taking medicine if diagnosed with HIV, rather than going to a witchdoctor.  This story is very close to reality in Nimule although it might seem a bit fantastic to people in Europe or America.  Everyone enjoyed it very much.  The witch-doctors were very dramatic and the misguided HIV positive parents died with great gusto, flinging themselves on the ground.  This drama was first performed at a local celebration of World AIDS Day, so the children were very well prepared. 

Teachers and cooks at the end of year event

A neighbouring school has recently built a borehole right next to the boundary of our two schools, which they have kindly agreed to share with us.  This will save our cooks from a trek carrying heavy jerricans of water each day.  I am hoping that this is the beginning of cooperation between our schools.

We have received help from several NGOs during the year.  Far Reaching Ministries has continued to feed the school as mentioned in previous posts.  Save the Children has been providing child protection training to staff and children.  Junubaid (a national NGO working with UNICEF) has provided two temporary latrines as well as a lot of teaching and recreational resources.  The local government has organised in-service training for two of our teachers, which is going to continue next year and end with full accreditation.

Pending approval from the local government, we have been promised two stands of four permanent latrines (8 latrines in all) by another NGO called HELP, who are working in the area of sanitation. 

During this term, we have built the foundations for another block of four classrooms.  Funding allowing, work will continue over the school holidays on permanent classrooms.  If the funding does not allow the construction of all four classrooms, the plan will be reduced to two temporary classrooms to be built on the new foundations.  This is necessary because next year we will have a Primary 4 class for the first time and are also intending to divide our pre-primary section into two classes, as there is a heavy demand for places and we do not want the class to be too big. 

Please can I ask for contributions towards the building work, to enable us to build four permanent rooms, rather than temporary ones? 

Our bank details are:

For UK tax payers, please send through the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund so that we can benefit from 25% tax relief from the UK government. Please contact me by email for the gift aid form, if you are able to donate in this way.  My email address is rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk.

We hope to have a link for US donors soon.

 

News from the school

I am writing to update you on the school’s progress and also to give you some exciting news.

Cece Primary School is fast approaching the end of the school year.  Next year we will need to have a new classroom to cater for a Primary 4 class.  At the moment we have four classrooms, for a Pre-Primary class, and Primary 1 to 3.  The end of primary education in South Sudan is Primary 8, so we still have a long way to go.  There will be a need to employ more teachers next year to cater for the new class. 

As there is no storeroom or teachers room, and we will again need to build more classrooms next year, we have decided to build a foundation ready for four classrooms (which will be the complete number of classrooms when the primary school is complete).  As funds for that whole block are unlikely to be available at once, we will then build just the first two classrooms on the foundations.  This will allow us to have a spare room which we can use for storage and a teachers room.

I am feeling very happy with the school’s progress over the past two years since June 2015.  We have moved from a very small school of 60 children in two Primary 1 classes in a loaned building, to a school of four classes with stable teaching on our own site, in purpose-built classrooms.  The current teachers are the best we have had, giving stable teaching compared to any other local school.  Those children who have been with us since the beginning of the school are far more advanced than those at other Nimule schools. 

We have a substantial meal for the children provided by Far Reaching Ministries every school day.  I cannot overstate the importance of this, as many of our families struggle to provide feeding at home at all.  I attach a link to a Guardian article which gives the picture of the impossible situation here with regard to feeding.

The big news is that I have decided to resign as headteacher with effect from the end of December.  The main reason for this is that Cece Primary School is intended to be a local community school and to become a stable school which can manage without foreign input as far as possible.  Another reason is that I am not getting any younger.  I want to ensure that the school can be sustained without me and can continue into the future whether I am there or not.  Given the volatile situation here, it is impossible to know what may happen next.

We employed a wonderful teacher two terms ago, called Patrick Gore.  Patrick is a very active, reliable and experienced teacher.  He is very concerned about disadvantaged children and has shown a real heart for our children in the time he has been with the school, even visiting sick children at home to check that they are alright.  Outside of school, he is a pastor with the Africa Inland Church, so he has leadership experience.  I have no doubt at all that he is the right person for the job.

I am intending to take a sabbatical for the first term of next year (from January to May) to allow Patrick to get on with his new role without feeling undermined by me.  I also, will find it hard to put myself under a new headteacher, so that term away will help both of us to adjust.  In June I will return as English teacher.  I will continue with my role as fundraiser.

Please can I ask you to continue to support the school as we move ahead both physically with our construction work, and to support the education of the children. 

Our bank details are:

For UK tax payers, please send through the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund so that we can benefit from 25% tax relief from the UK government. Please contact me by email for the gift aid form, if you are able to donate in this way.  My email address is rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk.

We hope to have a link for US donors soon.

Trip to Uganda

Early last term, a 12 year old girl followed some of her neighbour’s children to school.  The children explained that she did not go to school because she is deaf and mute.  I asked the children to speak to the girl’s mother and ask her if she would like her daughter to come to Cece Primary School.   The next day she came.  I explained that Assumpta has a right to go to school even with a disability.  Assumpta’s mother Cesarina is a widow and was very surprised that we would accept her child.  Most local people see any severe disability as a burden and it is very rare for families to make any attempt to find ways to improve the child’s situation.

From left to right, me, Cesarina, Assumpta and Teacher Izaru

The term was a difficult one.  As Assumpta had not been to school before and was incommunicado, she would rush in and out of all the classrooms, disturbing the teaching and doing exactly as she pleased.  Gradually she adjusted and started to stay in her own class, Primary 1.  However it was difficult to know what to do with her, while teaching a class of thirty children, all of whom are very easily distracted and many of whom are also new to school discipline.  I tried asking teachers who were not in class to remain as her assistant, but this did not work, as culturally it is unacceptable for an adult to go down to a child’s level.  The only method of teaching that South Sudanese teachers know is ‘talk and chalk’ in front of large classes with no interaction with the children.   I was rushed off my feet and had no time to train the teachers in how to assist an individual pupil.  The result was that Assumpta was neglected and I felt very guilty about it.  

By Assumpta’s behavior I suspected that she might not be deaf, but have a communication disorder such as autism, but there are no facilities in Nimule for any sort of assessment of special needs.  Then, by a happy chance, I was invited by Global Giving to go to Kampala for some training in fundraising on their website.  At the workshop I met a lady who works in a special needs organization in Gulu, a town in Uganda, easily accessible from Nimule.  I swooped on her and told her about Assumpta.  She said that she couldn’t help herself, but knew somebody in Gulu who could.  We exchanged contact details.  

Very shortly afterwards I had an email putting me in contact with Lois, a British speech and language therapist in Gulu.  Lois told me that there would be a visiting teacher of the deaf coming to visit her centre from 4^th September.  She invited us to come for an assessment of both hearing and speech that week.

The appointment was yesterday, so I, a fellow teacher, Assumpta and Assumpta’s mother, travelled to Gulu on Monday so we could be on time.  It was a very expensive journey.  Apart from myself, none of us had travel documents or ID.  This meant that we needed a letter from the local Head Chief explaining that we needed to travel to Uganda for medical reasons.  At the border, emergency travel documents were issued, at a cost of 1,500 South Sudanese Pounds (the equivalent of around $10).  I know this seems a small amount in Western terms, but in South Sudan that is the combined monthly wage of three government –paid teachers.  Then we had to get visas for Uganda for all four of us, costing $200.  The hotel costs and transport were far cheaper, around $8 altogether.

This is money which would otherwise have gone towards the building work of the new classroom block.  However, as you will realize, it is extremely important not just to have buildings, but to be able to help our children educationally to the best of our ability.

The appointment went very well.  Assumpta was assessed using various toys by the teacher for the deaf while we spoke with the speech and language therapist.  The result of the two hour assessment was that she is profoundly deaf and does not have a communication disorder.  She is very bright but has lacked any stimulation.  She uses a home-developed sign language and managed to communicate very well with the teacher for the deaf.   

The two professionals recommended that she stay at Cece Primary School.  They think she is too old to learn lip-reading effectively.  Instead we are going to learn Ugandan Sign Language, which will give Assumpta a much wider means of communication than at the moment.  The materials are going to be sent to me by email.  Then I am to organize teacher training in USL for both teachers and Assumpta’s mother.  I was told that it is most important that we all use the same signs all the time and that we encourage Assumpta to sign as well, instead of just reacting (as is what happens at the moment).  There is a unit for deaf children in Gulu but they thought it would be better if she could stay in her home environment rather than moving to a boarding school far from home.  The unit would also be a very big expense compared to keeping her here.

I am hoping that now we have some special needs contacts in Gulu, we will be able to assist more children in future, who would otherwise be without any chance in life at all.  This whole experience has brought it home to me, how necessary Cece Primary School is to Nimule.

Update on the end of term two.

I can only apologise for the lack of updates to this blog since June, when we started the second term.  It has been a real struggle juggling teaching and headteacher commitments with finding time even to keep up with emails.  Internet and computer access continue to be a serious hurdle, due to poor electrical supply, accessing a computer and the up and down phone and internet network.

We continue to bask in the joys of our new school building.  The whole community continues to struggle with the ongoing problems caused by the war.  School gives a sense of normality to all of us, children and teachers.  We have kept a normal school timetable going, giving the children a substantial meal each day through the help of Far Reaching Ministries. 

Since we started term, we have taken in thirty new children from the immediate area who meet our criteria (families with HIV, disabilities and orphans).  This is a challenge because of the low standards of teaching in their previous schools (in some cases a complete lack of previous education). 

Since the beginning of term we have two new teachers.  Doreen is a qualified nursery teacher from Uganda, who I am sure will be a great boon to the school.  One of the issues in South Sudan is the complete lack of a curriculum for younger children so I am really hoping she will be able to enhance the teaching of the pre-primary class through her experience in Uganda, which has a far more developed education system.  Additionally we have a qualified primary teacher called Patrick who is also a local pastor.

Yesterday was the last day of exams.  Afterwards I was followed home by several of my most eager students who just wanted to spend time sitting on the veranda with me and doing little odd jobs for my friend Pascalina, who is disabled.  I can’t imagine this happening in England.  Teaching here can be very challenging, but it certainly has its rewards.

However there is still a lot to be done.  In the next few months we need to build two new classrooms to cater for our new intake in January.  The current classrooms still need to be plastered and to have doors and windows fitted. 

The cooks need a kitchen.  At the moment they are cooking in the open, in the shade of the school building, but this relies on good weather.  They cook the beans in the compound where I live with Pascalina and then arduously carry them on their heads the 20 minute walk across rough and often slippery muddy ground to school.  They seriously need to be able to do all their cooking on site and for all the school food to be stored there instead of in my bedroom.

We have employed a watchman called Millah.  He has been doing a terrific job, clearing the long grass, making paths, mending the fence, planting a tree nursery, chasing away goats and cows and even sleeping on site in case of thieves.  One night thieves came, but were scared off by his shouts.  As the saplings grow, they will be transplanted to various points in the compound and around the perimeter.  Some are fruit trees such as mango, pawpaw and jack fruit.  There will also be neem and other shady trees, so that we can look forward to being able to sit around the compound, not just in the school building.  He has also been planting vegetables such as onions, aubergines, tomatoes and greens to enliven the school diet.  However it is a very big job for one man, especially given the large size of the compound.  We really need to employ another watchman to work with him.

As mentioned, the major need of the school at the moment is the construction work.  We do not waste money on extras.  Every penny we receive is used to enhance the teaching of our children, whether by providing suitable classrooms, staff salaries or running costs.  We really need your help so that the school can continue to develop and improve.

Our bank details are:

For UK tax payers, please send through the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund so that we can benefit from 25% tax relief from the UK government. Please contact me by email for the gift aid form, if you are able to donate in this way.  My email address is rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk.

We hope to have a link for US donors soon.

We are in our new school at last

Children carrying school equipment from the old school to the
 new one.

You will be pleased to know that last week we finally moved into our new school building, which will be the permanent home of Cece Primary School.  This comes exactly two years after starting the school.  Children and staff are so happy.  The classrooms are spacious and the grounds are huge.  It is wonderful after the increasingly constricted building and compound where we were before.  As a teacher it is now possible to ask the children to do activities which involve movement.  It is also noticeable that the children are no longer quarrelling or fighting.  I don’t know if this is due to the excitement of the move, or if the previous bad behaviour was due to being too cooped up.

Here is the history so far.  In May 2015, I and Pascalina Iddreangwa, the founder of the Cece Support Group for People Living with HIV and AIDs, decided to open a school for children from the families of the support group and also for those children from families with disabilities and orphaned children.  These children are the poorest and most marginalized in the Nimule area.  They lacked the opportunity to go to school because all the local schools demanded school fees as well as many other add-on fees.  Our idea was to provide a non-fee-paying school relying on outside donations and NGO support to provide teacher and cook salaries, teaching materials and food for the children.  A local NGO called HUMAES (Humans Must Access Essentials) then joined with us to provide their help.  I sent an email to family and friends and immediately people started to make monthly donations.

Within one month, at the beginning of June 2015, we opened the school in Calvary Chapel’s compound, using their two Sunday School rooms.  However, this proved to be a very short term solution as their compound was too congested.  HUMAES found a local man who was very happy to let us use his empty building free of charge.  We remained in this building for nearly two years.  It was a very good solution in the short term, but as the numbers of children and classes grew it became very cramped.  We began with only two Primary One classes.  This expanded in the second year to three classes as children moved up to the next level and new children joined us.  There are currently four classes, from Pre-Primary to Primary Three.  The school will continue to grow up to Primary Eight, which is the last year of primary school in South Sudan.

Late in 2015 Pascalina asked her father, who is a local chief, if he could donate a large piece of land so we could build a permanent home for the school.  He agreed on condition that we fenced the land to stop people taking it over without permission (a very common event in South Sudan).  Fencing was a major challenge as our regular donations were only able to support the day-to-day running of the school.  My family came to the rescue and paid for temporary fencing.  There things remained as we struggled to raise funds for building work.

Then, in September 2016, I made a trip to England.  While there, I gave a talk one weekend after each Mass at my former parish church, St Barnabas, East Molesey.  The collections were very generous and we acquired new regular donors as a result, some of whom have been extremely generous and remain in contact.  The parish priest, Father John Horn, also introduced me to a charity called Sean Devereux Children’s Fund.  SDCF kindly donated £5,000 to start off our building work.  They also agreed to let us use their charity’s status so we could gain 25% extra on donations from UK tax-payers’ donations.  This enabled us to finally start building.

Building work started in December 2016 while it was the school holidays.  This was necessary because we needed to prioritise funding for the running of the school during term time and accumulate any extra funds ready for the larger expenses of the building work.  The final spate of construction work during the school holidays in May 2017 has resulted in four complete classrooms.  We had help from a national NGO called JunubAid, who have provided temporary latrines and a temporary learning space, working with UNICEF.  A Global Giving campaign contributed to the roofing of the building.  St Augustines in Hammersmith, London also held a talk and collection which provided a significant boost to the fundraising efforts through the help of Peter Hickson, a long-term supporter.

Far Reaching Ministries (as mentioned in previous posts) has also contributed greatly by providing maize flour and beans for a sustaining meal for the children.  As well as the work mentioned already, JunubAid and UNICEF has provided six beautiful blackboards and other teaching and play materials.

Our first assembly at the new school

Thank you to all those who have made this school possible.  It would have been completely impossible to establish Cece Primary School without your help.  The growth of Cece Primary School has been remarkable, especially as it has happened at a time of such huge instability in the country at large.  The poorest are the ones who have suffered most.  The numbers of children have grown from 60 at the start of the school in 2015 to 130 at the start of the second term this year.  Of these here are some statistics:

Parents with HIV	32
Children with HIV	5
Parents with Disability	19
Children with Disability	11
Orphans	98

 You will notice from the statistics the huge number of orphans.  Their parents’ deaths are not all due to AIDS; some have been killed by soldiers or bandits, often while fleeing from conflict areas of the country and others have died of treatable diseases.  The children with disabilities include children with Hepatitis B, epilepsy, profound deafness (mute) and minor hearing or sight problems.  The total number of families benefiting from the school is 78.

What remains to be done?

So far we have put in door and windows in only one classroom due to lack of funds.  This classroom is doubling as our storeroom.  We need to add doors and windows to the other three classrooms and plaster all the classrooms.  We need to build permanent latrines.  We also want to order desks and chairs for all the children (at the moment they sit on mats on the floor).  Later in the year, we also need to start constructing more classrooms ready for expansion next year.

We also need a water supply.  Currently our cooks are carrying large jerricans of water from a water point outside the compound in the compound of a local church outside the school boundaries.  In the longer term we want to have our own water to avoid congestion and for ease of use.  We have been told that we can run a pipe from the current water point into our compound.  Water is needed for cleaning, cooking, drinking and cultivating our own crops for school use.  The water point will also benefit the local community who provided the land for our school in the first place.  Provision of a water point will be a very good way in which to thank them.

Global Giving accepted a proposal from HUMAES to raise funds with the aim of constructing the water point.  The Global Giving campaign has now begun.  The details on the project on the fundraising page are those originally submitted, before we discovered about the possibility of piping the water from another water point.  Please treat the description in this post as the more accurate.  If a surplus of funds are generated, they will be used to build a  water harvesting tank, to take advantage of the copious rainfall here during the rainy season.

This will be our second Global Giving campaign.  Some donors have asked about the administration charge which is made by Global Giving.  Global Giving deducts an administration charge of 15%.  However, they give an option for donors to add an amount to their donation so that this charge can be lessened.  It would assist us if donors are willing to select this option.  We consider that it is worthwhile for us to fundraise through Global Giving as, whichever method of fundraising we use, there will always be deductions for bank charges when money is transferred internationally whatever method is used. 

A great advantage of using Global Giving is that it allows us to reach out worldwide.  We have been impressed by the speed at which they send the collected donations at the end of the campaign period.

However, for those who are UK tax payers, it is more cost-effective to donate through the Sean Devereux Children’s Fund so that we can benefit from 25% tax relief from the UK government. Please contact me by email for the gift aid form, if you are able to donate in this way.  My email address is rebeccamallinson1@hotmail.co.uk.

We hope to have a link for US donors soon.

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 www.facebook.com/nimule. 

Update from the school

It is a long time since I last updated everybody about the school.  In that time a lot has happened.

After our initial push to construct the school over the Christmas holidays, we were forced to suspend the work due to lack of funds.  Running costs for the existing school have to be a priority otherwise there will be no school.  As the first three months passed, we received some large donations which we have been able to accumulate to enable work to resume.  We now have enough to roof the school building and are about to start work again.

We are fast approaching the school holidays.  Next week is exam week for the end of the first term, so the children have been revising.  There have been challenges with staff sickness, but we now have most of the papers ready for the children.  I have been typing and copying papers every evening for the past week.

As mentioned in my post called, 'Full of Beans', feeding for the children is even more essential than ever as there is widespread hunger in Nimule.  A local ministry called Far Reaching Ministries has been supplying all local schools with sacks of maize flour and beans each week.  This has enabled us to give the children a far more sustaining meal than previously.  The only problem is that we have had to find an extra cook to cope with the increased workload, buy extra catering-size saucepans and extra firewood and salt and onions, so the cost of feeding has in fact gone up rather than down.

We have had a stroke of great good fortune.  Last week we were told that a national NGO called Junibaid has assisted UNICEF to select Cece Primary School as one of three schools in Nimule to benefit from a large pack of school goods.  The children are so excited.  There are footballs, volleyballs, volleyball net, coloured tabards to differentiate teams, soft balls and skipping ropes.  They have also given us four blackboards, chalk, pens, rulers, slates for the younger children, paper and a long list of other things.  They have also promised to provide a temporary canvas classroom tent and temporary latrines. 

From the children’s point of view the highlight is that we have been promised school uniforms.  The children are particularly excited about the future school uniforms because they have been suffering fromsneers from children from other schools because up until now we have been the only school with no uniform.

We are now looking for help to drill a borehole on the new school site.  This should be possible through one of the international NGOs as provision of safe water is a priority area for humanitarian assistance.  Without a borehole, the cooks will have to walk miles to a distant borehole to fetch jerricans of water for cooking, washing and drinking for over 100 children plus teachers, so this really is essential.  I have been writing to various potentially promising NGOs, so far with no response, but I am sure we will succeed in the end.  Once the holidays begin I am going to visit the Juba offices of CAFOD who I am hoping will help.

The situation here is much the same as it was last time I wrote.  There are continuing difficulties with travel, but the local public transport operators have now agreed to travel in convoy together to avoid the dangers of armed robbery and shootings, which have plagued us ever since last July.  Fortunately day-to-day life continues relatively normally in Nimule, unlike every other town in the area.  Apart from Cece, some other schools are still functioning, although with few teachers and children, while others have closed. 

I am very proud to say that our school is the big success story of the current crisis.  At no point have we closed down, even though every other school closed following the crisis last July.  Our school is currently full to capacity and we have enough teachers and cooks.  We are also the only school which is looking to the future and building for next year.

A very big thank you to all our donors, those known to me personally and those unknown.  Without you, none of this would ever have happened.

If you are a UK resident and would like to donate to the school, 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 UK tax-payer.  You will need to set up a standing order to the Sean Devereux account, whose details are on the Gift Aid form. 

If you are a US resident, we now have an arrangement with Children of Africa, who are allowing donors to use their account to channel money to the school.  Please click on https://childrenofafrica-usa.givingfuel.com/cece-primary-school.

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 www.facebook.com/nimule.