Bakhita Village Primary School Needs Your Help

In this brief report from eastern Chad, Anne Goddard, Education Programme Manager for our partner CORD, describes how villagers in Bakhita are chipping in to build their new primary school. To complete construction, though, they need your help. Please consider donating for school construction to help the villagers help themselves through education.

This is the school for the village of Bakhita, 6km south of Hadjer Hadid [the village home to many aid organizations working in the nearby refugee camps]. In the background you can see the shelter made of natural materials, which is the current primary school. The villagers made this from their own resources. In the foreground you can see the villagers building their new primary school, which will have two classrooms for the students. The villagers have each purchased 40 bricks so that this can take place – it takes around 7,500 bricks for a school of this size. They are "cementing" the bricks together with mud and you can see the donkey with its water sacks, along with the barrel that were distributed by CORD in 2007. When the school is completed in a couple of weeks, CORD has agreed to provide the frame for the roof and plastic sheeting. The pre-school will then move into the shelter and the primary school will have the brick building.

To ensure the longevity of the building, 15 bags of cement are needed to finally cover over all the bricks inside and out [otherwise, the mud mortar gradually washes away in the rainy seasons]. A zinc roof is stronger and longer lasting than plastic sheeting. To keep the inside of the school in good condition [i.e., to keep out messy animals], metal doors and windows would be required. The cost of all this is about $1,870.

102 students are enrolled in the primary school, 40 in the pre-school, with 350 adults from this and 5 smaller satellite villages learning French and/or Arabic literacy. Progress is slow, but step by step they are moving forwards and we hope that a love for education will result from participation through partnership with CORD for the villagers of Bakhita.

If you have ever dreamed of helping to build a school in Africa, this is a great opportunity, because you can see that the villagers are themselves doing a lot of the work. They just need your help to properly finish the school. To make a contribution of any amount specifically for school construction in Bakhita or other nearby Chadian villages, please click here. To read more about the importance of school construction in these villages, click here.