Our chair Diane Fisher spent some time at Ceesay Nursery School last month – the main purpose of her trip being to progress work on making the school a self-sustaining establishment. As part of that work she:
- Met with local women to discuss ways of getting new children enrolled in the school
- Spoke with a Gambian charity lawyer and a government official about setting up a charity to run the school
- Organised work on the school building itself, not least filling the Virginia Stuart library with books for the pupils
Diane spent some time on the first day sitting in on one of Head Classroom Teacher Adama Ceesay’s Jolly Phonics class, “which was great,” she says, “despite only having 16 children in the class.” With a capacity for up to 100-120 children, there is much work to be done to enrol more of them to the school.
Diane explains: “Without more enrolment of students paying the very low fees of 300dl (£4.50) a term, plus 100dl for school materials, the school can’t become self-supporting, or offer free places to children whose parents can’t afford even those low fees. But I think that some of the programmes and initiatives we are starting will attract the local women and their children into the school and by September, enrolment will be much higher.”
Diane started to engage the local women during her trip, with Adama organising a meeting with them while the men were at the mosque. She spoke with them about the value of Early Child Development Education and about our offer of free nursery school places for two children a year, in exchange for volunteer help at the school by the parents.
“They discussed this but said that in many cases their children needed food more than education and they were all very poor,” says Diane. “We talked about starting a food programme and asked them to choose a member of their community to make the porridge in the morning and clean, in exchange for a very small local salary. They chose a widow who looked like she really needed to have food herself and everyone was happy about that.
“We bought the meal, sugar and salt ourselves to make sure we got it as inexpensively as possible and arranged for someone to chop firewood for cooking. The new ‘Breakfast Club’ started on 1st May and we have agreed to start paying the school cook/cleaner 1200dl (£19) a month for the time being, to see how that goes.”
Also during the trip Diane, Momodou, Sponsorship Manager Fatou Jallow and former Project Manager Gabriel Mendy (he’s now at university but still helps out where he can) went to the Gambian office of Direct Aid – a charity based in Kuwait that is dedicated to providing education to children all over Africa. There they spoke to one of the charity’s lawyers, Mr Ansu Kinteh, who has agreed to advise us on setting up the Gambian arm of the charity and regaining legal hold of the school from Head Teacher Mr Bakary Ceesay, who has lost our confidence.
“Mr Kinteh was supremely professional, clear and helpful,” says Diane. He arranged for them to meet Mr Lamin Camera from the Ministry of Basic Education in Banjul, and he talked them through how to officially register the school with the Ministry so the school’s use as an education establishment cannot be changed.
Diane and the Gambian team met Mr Camera at the Ministry later in the week, and they found him also to be extremely helpful. He drafted a registration letter for us to send to the Permanent Secretary and introduced them to colleagues of his who advised them on all the aspects of registering the school.
While the work to secure the future of the school continues, there’s also work to improve the present. Diane spent some time with the school’s Project Manager Momodou Jallow identifying maintenance and building works that still need doing, and planning how to complete these. The main practical task is get the school connected up to electricity so the water storage tank can be filled from the borehole.
Diane also went to Timbooktoo, Gambia’s award-winning bookstore, to collect, as she excitedly describes it, “a lovely big box of heavily discounted brand new books for our school library!”
She adds: “We travelled back to the school and spent the afternoon stamping the books with ‘Property of Ceesay Nursery School’ then joyfully stocking the new library shelves with this fantastic selection of 45 beautiful new, culturally and age appropriate books! Adama will manage the library and, for the moment, the books will stay on the school premises and be securely locked up by Adama when the library is not in use.”
We have also enlisted the help of local artist Hugo Ugowan again. He painted the logos of our classroom sponsors Ninja Tune, Daz’s Rock 4 Charity and APS outside each classroom, and is now now painting the school’s logo next to the gate and starting work on what we’re calling a ‘Gratitude Wall’ – a way of acknowledging all the kind and helpful contributions, big and small, various people have made to the charity over the years.
Ceesay Nursery School 