CURRENT PROJECTS
ALBERTA CANADA PRIMARY SCHOOL,
ROMANO VILLAGE, TONKOLILI DISTRICT, SIERRA LEONE
PARTNER: Tamaraneh Society (Edmonton)
Click
here for project flyer
This project is the dream of Memunatu Dura Kamara,
a refugee from Sierra Leone, and her friends. Through their fundraising
and Change for Children support they have built a 9 room school
house for the children of Romano village after their earlier school
was destroyed in the civil war. Currently the project works to provide
funds for teachers’ salaries and to continue to develop the
school, which provides classes for children and youth from 6 surrounding
communities. The school is named Alberta Canada Primary School.
Sierra Leone Project update
In Ramona Village, Sierra Leone, the Alberta Canada
Primary School is alive and well. Funds have been raised to hire
four teachers at the yearly Sierra Leone rate of $1,400.00 per teacher.
These teachers teach 630 children how to do basic reading and math
with only 100 notebooks and pencils, very few texts and children
sitting five to a bench. In addition they have to figure out how
to feed all those hungry children by 2:00 in the afternoon before
they start the two hour walk home. When the day is finished, teachers
head off to the Memonatu Dura Kamara’s father’s small
house where they sleep two to a room. Meanwhile the villagers have
other things to deal with; tending the community gardens to try
to stretch food for everyone, digging a well for water and trying
to build a community health centre so that the high death rate for
mothers giving birth and their children dying from easily treated
illnesses can be somewhat abated. But the villagers are courageous
and hard working because they have hope. They know that someone
in Alberta, Canada is their voice and works tirelessly for them.
Who is this person and how did this project start?
A year ago I met Memonatu Dura Kamera from Sierra
Leone after she spoke at a conference and sang a song about coming
to Canada that charmed everyone’s hearts. This remarkable
woman was the president of a refugee camp between Sierra Leone and
Guinea for seven horrible years. She underwent every kind of deprivation,
abuse and torture and through some very incredible events managed
to immigrate to Canada three years ago with six of her own children
and two that she adopted. During the three years Memonatu has been
here she managed to go from a grade three level of education to
grade ten, get a nursing assistant diploma and continues her studies
now so she can be a social worker.
For most of us, this would have been enough, considering
she was also feeding a very large family and improving her English.
But Memonatu was haunted by the suffering of her compatriots and
so she started a project to build a primary school in Ramona village,
Sierra Leone, through a variety of fund raisers. The school is now
built, and Memonatu has been continuously working to fund and make
sustainable the infrastructure that this forgotten and neglected
people need to rebuild their lives after a devastating war. The
Ramona Village project in Sierra Leone needs ongoing funding to
bring it to the point were people can live with a minimum of human
dignity. Donors can choose to give to a variety of projects ranging
from farming to school supplies to teacher and health care worker
salaries to health care supplies. And they can hear directly from
the people through the videos and letters they send regularly to
Canada via Memona.
RURAL REHABILITATION CLINIC-HANDS ACROSS
AFRICA
This project was started to by Australian Sister
Ann Stevens to assist the hundreds of people in the region affected
by Sierra Leone’s violent civil war. The Clinic creates adaptive
devices from local materials to allow people who have lost limbs
or been severely injured in the war to acquire trades and skills
needed for survival. In partnership with Hands Across Africa, Change
for Children is supporting the growth of the current community rehabilitation
initiative into a larger rural rehabilitation clinic.
www.handsacrossafrica.org
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