|
PAST PROJECTS
ALBERTA CANADA
PRIMARY SCHOOL, ROMANO VILLAGE, TONKOLILI DISTRICT, SIERRA LEONE
PARTNER: Tamaraneh Society
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
|
