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.