Learning English is viewed as a “road to freedom” by refugees from Darfur, says Anne Goddard, CORD’s Education Programme Manager for Chad. It is critical to their chance of enrollment in university. However, the road currently available in the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga Camps is bumpy at best, paved with a small assortment of outdated books that are difficult for the refugees to use. Help us build them a highway by providing the well-established, familiar, and user-friendly Headway English Course that they so badly desire.

Update: Our shipment of 1,750 pairs of reading glasses has reached the refugees in Chad! For photos and discussion, click here.

This is your chance to start a revolution, a revolution in learning for Darfur refugees and villagers in eastern Chad.

Book Wish Foundation, with your help, will provide solar lighting for schools in the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga refugee camps and the 11 nearby Chadian villages of Barde, Bakhita, Bredjing, Faguire, Fodji, Kadjala, Kinouane, Koundoulba, Lira, Mobouguine, and Rataye. The lighting will:

• illuminate literacy classes for 2,500 students in the villages
• help school teachers at 13 refugee schools grade papers and prepare lessons in the evening
• enable self-study groups of school teachers to meet after dark, to improve their subject knowledge and teaching skill (the teachers are themselves refugees)
• improve night-time English classes for 300 Darfuris in Treguine camp, which meet in very basic homes in groups of up to 30

Of all the items on the Chad Wish List, library construction has the potential to impact the most people. A library can be used by everyone in the community, young or old, in school or not, with interests as diverse as its collection. To provide nearly 70,000 Darfur refugees with broad access to books for education, mental health, and occupational training, we are asking for your help to build three libraries, one in each of the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga Refugee Camps.

If you have ever dreamed of helping to build a school in Africa, this is your chance. 12 primary schools in eastern Chad are in partial stages of construction, and need a little extra funding to be completed. When you read some of what is needed and why, you won't know whether to laugh or cry. What makes this an unusually important opportunity, though, is the location of the schools. They serve Chadian villages in the vicinity of Darfur refugee camps, communities desperately poor to begin with and further stressed by the massive influx of refugees. Your support for the villagers, who have been relatively overlooked by donors, will have the added benefit of easing tensions in this critical region.

The adult literacy rate of Chad is abysmally low, only 25.7%, the third lowest of 177 countries reported on by the United Nations Development Programme. For Chadian women, the situation is even more dire. Book Wish Foundation is excited to partner with CORD to improve literacy classes for 2,500 villagers — 60% of them women — in 11 villages in eastern Chad.

As time passes and the crisis in Darfur continues, an increasing number of refugees in Chad are advancing through the educational system established in the camps and reaching secondary school. Successful completion of secondary school means that they might be able to attend university and find a future outside the camps, but a simple fact stands in the way of their success: they don’t have enough textbooks.

To enhance the value of French and Arabic literacy classes for 2,500-3,000 students in 11-12 villages in eastern Chad, Book Wish Foundation requests your help to provide mini-libraries of 50 easy reading books for each village. The books will be at an appropriate reading level for the newly literate, and will cover topics of local need and interest. These will be some of the first real books the students will ever read!

“There is a great need” for English-Arabic and French-Arabic dictionaries in refugee camps and villages in Eastern Chad, according to our on-the-ground partner CORD. For the refugees from Darfur, who view learning English as a “road to freedom,” English-Arabic dictionaries can turbo-charge their studies. For the Chadian villagers, who are enrolled in the thousands in literacy and early school programs, knowledge of French, an official language of Chad, can give them greater opportunities in life.

Want to help refugees from Darfur and promote environmentally-friendly technology at the same time? Help us send 100 solar-powered CD players to refugee camps in Chad, to enable refugees studying English to listen to the audio component of their course.