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SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS Phase 2
After 23 years of civil war in South Sudan, refugees have returned to resettle their homelands with a few hand tools and a 3 month supply of food. They need virtually everything, but will unanimously agree that the most important thing to have in their villages are schools.
In 2008, the Encinitas Coastal Rotary Club was asked to help start a school in Upper Nile State, South Sudan. Members of the club worked with a Sudanese-American refugee to help with the planning, funding and implementation of the project. In 2009, the Jarweng Promise School was built by the villagers themselves and is now set to operate in Porbor village.
In February, 2009, we travelled to Upper Nile with to meet with the school committee, register students, plan the school year, work on a budget, and hire teachers. No matter what physical buildings the local schools have, the lack of government support for operations has forced most schools to close or restrict their schedules. Most government supported schools operate on 6 month school year leaving teachers unemployed and buildings unused the rest of the year.
The Jarweng Promise School will operate year-round, with 2 sessions per day and with teachers being paid for a full year. Over 400 students of all ages have registered to start school in Primary 1 (first grade).
A key component for the school's sustainability was the establishment of a store to generate operational funds to make the school self-sustaining. Previously, a resident would have walked 4 hours one-way to the nearest store to buy the simplest necessity. The store, run by the school committee in the village, will provide a service for the residents and we project that it will generate all the operational funds that are needed for the school.
We would like to repeat this process to establish new schools in South Sudan. Our club contributed $5000 last year. We had additional donations that brought the project total to about $10,000. The funds were used to provide seeds and start a school garden, to pay for food in exchange for labor to gather building materials, for roofing materials and framing, materials transportation, goods for stocking the store, for school supplies and for teachers' salary guarantees for a year.
We recognize that each village has different needs and will be investigating those needs as move forward.
We have a Powerpoint presentation which fully describes our visit to South Sudan this year and will be happy to explain our project to anyone. See Project P4, SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS Phase 3 if you would like to participate in our efforts. Thank you.
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