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Success Story!

On Sunday, September 18th, we led on our annual 10-mile sponsored walk along Regent’s Canal in London, from St Pancras Old Church in Kings Cross to finish up by the River Thames in Limehouse.

We did it! A real team effort and success and a beautiful autumn day walking to raise funds for FREE breakfasts for the kids at Ceesay Nursery School in The Gambia.

A massive thanks to those who walked, all the wonderful supporters who donated and St Pancras Old Church for welcoming us at the start of our walk, with access to the church facilities and teas and coffees.

We exceeded our target of raising £900, with Gift Aid being able to contribute a fantastic £1,031.25 to our work in the Gambia! Every penny we raise goes directly to our work to help poor and orphaned kids go to school.

Thanks to our family, friends and kind supporters, we can be confident that this year, all the kids at the nursery school can now look forward to a hot, nutritious, filling free breakfast every single school day!

But, the story doesn’t end with our team of committed volunteers here in London….Once in the Gambia, our Project Manager, Momodou Jallow and our Head Classroom Teacher get busy shopping. They go to the local market in Latrikunda and to various local businesses to get everything they need for the breakfasts: corn, which is ground up to make a nutritious porridge, milk, sugar, salt and wood for the daily cooking fire.

Then, these very heavy materials are loaded up into the back of a local taxi. The corn is taken to be ground into fine meal for cooking. Then all is taken over dirt roads back into the countryside, to the school. Once there, it is unloaded and stored securely against tropical wildlife and any tendency to ‘walk’ away from the school at night time.

Next, the woodcutter arrives and spend an entire day of gruelling physical labour chopping up the wood for the daily cooking fire.

Finally, at first light every morning, our very hardworking and caring school cook, Mai Colley, arrives at the school to build a fire and get the water boiling

to start cooking the breakfasts for the whole school. She serves it to the children when they arrive and then washes and clears everything away, singlehandedly. Mai loves seeing the children eating their hot, nutritious breakfasts and thanks all of us for making this possible!

This year, due to complex interlinked global factors including the war in the Ukraine, the increased cost of fuel and the climate crisis, the cost of corn had actually doubled! Adama reported that the cost of milk and sugar had also risen astronomically. In practical terms, this means that families can buy about half the food they were able to buy last year, for the same amount of money. Our efforts to make sure the children at least have breakfast are therefore even more critical than previously. If you can help us at all, please donate here, no amount is too small.

Upcoming Event – our 15th Birthday Celebration!

That’s right – unbelievably, this year 2022, we have been working in the Gambia for 15 years! And none of our successes could have been possible without YOU! Your faithful support and generosity and trust has been phenomenal. Now we want to say ‘thank you’.

NB. This is NOT a fundraiser 😊

What: A delicious, informal South Indian vegan dinner, with family, friends, sponsors and charity supporters – followed by a short presentation charting some of our successes, failures and most hilarious and memorable moments over the last 15 years!

When: Friday, December 16th from 6 – 10 pm

Where: Thenga Café

Cost: £25 a head, to include snacks, dinner and all non-alcoholic drinks. You are welcome to bring your own alcoholic refreshments, or buy separately at the café on the night.

Art Exhibition Fundraiser at Thenga Cafe in North London

On Sunday 7th October at Thenga Cafe in north London, from 2pm to 6pm, we are hosting an art exhibition fundraiser to raise money for our ongoing work with charity MyFarm educating local women in Mandinari, the Gambia to start their own enterprise or business.

One of our volunteer fundraisers Lina Kochanske has organised the afternoon of music, food and drink, a raffle and “the most beautiful art of very kind and generous artists, who have donated their art” to raise money for the women’s enterprise project.

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Whether you can attend the event or not, you can contribute to the project at Lina’s fundraising page. Also, she is also selling a range of artwork and crafts on Etsy, all proceeds of which go towards the women’s enterprise project.

The event is taking place at the vegetarian and vegan Thenga Cafe in north London, just a few minutes walk from King’s Cross. We have previously held a fundraiser at the venue (see below), so we can vouch the vegetarian and vegan Indian food is absolutely delicious and well worth the visit just for that!

Training Ceesay Nursery School’s Staff and Parents in Basic First Aid

As well as beginning to work with Gambian charity MyFarm, we are also pleased to have started a partnership with First Aid 4 Gambia. First Aid 4 Gambia are a UK charity that aims to provide Gambians with basic first aid and healthcare knowledge in order to ease the burden on the country’s few hospitals and save lives.

Part of their mission is to visit Gambian schools and nurseries to train the teachers in basic life-saving first aid and provide them with first aid kits. On 7th May we were pleased to host them at Ceesay Nursery School for a full-day course of emergency first aid training.

All of our staff members – including head teacher Mr Bakary Ceesay and head classroom teacher Adama Ceesay – one of our sponsored children, and four parents of the school’s pupils attended. Everyone received a certificate at the end from the excellent trainer Momodou Laineh, and the general feedback was that they found the training “enjoyable and very informative”.

New Partnership with Gambian Charity MyFarm to Enable Local Enterprise

We are pleased to have begun a working partnership with MyFarm, an educational and entrepreneurial charity located in Sukuta, a town near Ceesay Nursery School.

Managed by Kelly Taboure, a friend of our chair Diane Fisher, the charity is a residential education centre that runs programmes for children, young people and farmers with a focus on sustainable farming and entrepreneurial skills, as well as basic education for children from the local area.

During Diane’s trip to Ceesay Nursery School last month, she met with women from the local community to discuss how to get more local children enrolled at the school. Part of that discussion included conversations about using the school building as a wider community resource.

Diane explains: “To help those women that can’t afford to enroll their children at the school, I suggested the idea of helping them start their own enterprise or business project, based at the school. But I was clear they had to work together – it couldn’t be something a woman just did for herself and took home with her. It would need to benefit the school and help develop it, as well as helping them.

“Some ideas they had were: making skin creams, juices, clothes, pretty soaps, tie-dying materials and processing, drying and packaging moringa. They discussed this a lot but no real decision was reached.”

So Diane enlisted the help of MyFarm. She and the Gambian team went to visit the farm to take a closer look at the work they do and to see their enterprise training in action. “This was a very successful visit,” says Diane, “that resulted in new friendships and connections, as well as lots of inspirational ideas that our Gambian team would like to put in place.”

MyFarm has an outreach programme, called MyFarm on Wheels, and they came to the school on 9th May to work with the local women and help them decide what project they wanted to work on, to give them some direction.

With Gambian Alagie Ndow leading the training, the enterprise day went very well, with many enthusiastic local women learning how to make soap to sell. The women decided to start with soap making and then, with their profits, look at making other items in the future.

The next step is to fundraise £200 to pay for a week’s training, transport and food, and all the materials the women will need to set up properly as a community business at the school. We have a UK fundraiser, Lina Kochanske, who has volunteered to support the project by selling her artwork and bespoke greeting cards online, through Etsy.

Working Towards the Sustainability of Ceesay Nursery School

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.

Our Chair Diane Is Visiting the School!

Our chair Diane Fisher is in the Gambia at the moment, continuing the work to establish Ceesay Nursery School as a place of education for generations of Gambians to come.

While there she is continuing to improve the sponsorship process, having employed Fatou Jallow, an interpreter we met on our last trip, to manage it in our absence.

She is also visiting the school and the staff, meeting the parents of the children, who are helping her find local children who need sponsorship to be educated, and meeting the school’s new lawyer to discuss setting up a charity in the Gambia to manage the school.

It’s a busy schedule but leaves some time for eating lovely Gambian food and trying out new hairstyles! Diane has also treated Fatou and the school’s project managers Momodou Jallow and Gabriel Mendy to a trip to the beautiful riverside Lamin Lodge.

Ceesay Nursery School Library Takes Shape!

Work continues on fitting out and filling the school library, named the ‘Virginia Stuart Library’ after our chair Diane’s 99-year-old Mum!

The shelves are in and Diane has secured a large selection of books from a local book supplier Timbooktoo Gambia for just over £200. This includes reference books, story books about African children such as Handa’s Hen by Eileen Browne, and a library stamp.

Diane is picking up the books on her current trip to the Gambia, more on which to follow!

Work Continues on a Water Borehole for the School

The borehole was tested on 17 March and it was all working very well. The tall metal structure you see in the photos was used to help the engineers sink the borehole deeply enough to make sure there was water at any time of year.

Now we are applying for electricity from NAWEK (National Water and Electricity Company) to pump the water up, which apparently takes a long time to get. There are quicker short-term alternatives, but eventually the school will need its own electricity anyway, so we think it’s best to go ahead with the application. Our chair Diane will look at whether there’s other sustainable options when she visits the school this month.

Work Begins on a Water Borehole for Ceesay Nursery School

Who said construction work couldn’t be fun! In the past few weeks, the staff and children at the new Ceesay Nursery School have been watching with great interest and anticipation as a team of engineers have got to work drilling them their very own water borehole in the school grounds.

The need for the school to have its own source of pure drinking water was identified by the government education officer who attended our official school opening ceremony on 5th December.

Previously, building work was completed using water purchased from the well of a neighbouring compound. Continuing this arrangement would have been financially unsustainable for the school, as well as having the potential for contamination and serious health implications for the children and the staff.

A water borehole is a specially engineered hole in the ground, dug deeply enough to access pure water. Typically, a borehole used as a water well is completed by installing a vertical pipe and well screen to keep the borehole from caving in. This also helps prevent surface contaminants from entering the borehole and protects any installed pump from drawing in sand and cement.

When this is completed, not only will the school have a tested and guaranteed (for one year) source of pure drinking water for the students, it will also facilitate the breakfast porridge programme we aim to start in the summer term. It will also enable the children to grow food in the garden.

In sub-Saharan Africa, having a reliable source of water is crucial, and this will greatly increase the value of the school for current and future students.

Ceesay Nursery School would like to thank the many very generous donors who have made this school building project possible.