One of the schools Children in Crisis has recently rebuilt was recently featured in The Observer newspaper. Journalist Tim Adams accompanied supporters Ron and Pauline Friend who have raised funds in memory of their son Martin to build Mishashu Primary School. Click here to read the article
Mishashu Primary School is located in the High Plateau Region of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The school, like three others Children in Crisis is building in the region, has six classrooms with a capacity for approximately 240 children, one office for teachers and four latrines. Training materials for teachers along with notebooks, textbooks and stationery have also been supplied. Since the school was rebuilt, enrolment rates have increased from 158 to just under 300 pupils (at the start of this September term) and the new building is now also being used in the afternoons as a secondary school (with 120 pupils enrolled).
This school will be a place to build enquiring minds, repair damaged relations between communities and convey life-saving messages, for example, about the risks of HIV/AIDS. The impact they will have on the communities they will serve was expressed by a young teacher we heard from recently who had completed our teacher training course:
“This school will change our whole environment. Children will like going here and their learning will improve, they will want to study. The fact that children want to stay in school will stabilise this community – families won’t have to go to Uvira (the nearest town) to give their children good education. Displaced people will move back here bringing their cows, and help create better economic stability.”
“This school will form the intellectuals of our region. It will create an interest in learning across the community, leading to a raising of the intellect and raising interest in education. It will encourage children to seek equality with other countries and create change for the better in their communities.”
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Butoto is one of the first students now attending classes in one of the schools.
Butoto's Story
Butoto started school in the first grade in September 2007 and is now attending classes in the newly built school in her village.
Butoto has four brothers and a twin sister. Her family, like all the families in the village, are subsistence farmers and they live in a mud brick hut made up of two rooms – one for her parents and the other which is for the children.
Butoto is very excited about the new school. “It means I can go to school even when it is raining and it will be warmer than the old school”. She told us she feels very proud because her mother helped to build the school – “she carried water for the cement and carried rocks to be crushed into stones for the foundations.”
At school, Butoto’s favourite thing to do is play ‘huru’, a game popular with children in the area that is a type of handball game played with a ball fashioned from rags and plastic bags.
When she finishes school she wants to be a nurse. Now that her school is being used as a secondary school in the afternoons, Butoto won't have to walk over two hours each day when she graduates, and can spend this time studying so she can achieve her goal.
