A huge thank you to all our friends, including Councillor Dora Dixon-Fyle, The Worshipful Mayor of Southwark, Reverend and Mrs. David Coram, Reverend William George, Derek Vincent, and the Leigh Family who took the time to join us on Sunday 13th December at our carol service at Norbury Baptist Church, made donations, sent good wishes and in many other ways rendered support to make the carol service such a success. All the support was greatly appreciated.
My fellow Trustees and I, would like to take this opportunity to thank our Secretary, Karin Hyde, for her tireless efforts in organising this event.
We had a wonderful service with nine carols and nine readings. The service was graced by a solo performance from a very talented young singer, Jojo Philips (pictured).
Our speaker, Iyamide Thomas, during her address entitled ‘Krio Women: Pioneers in Education’, treated the congregation to an interesting overview of several female Sierra Leonean educators who were trailblazers in their time: Hannah Benka-Coker, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Lati Hyde-Forster, Constance Cummings-John, Frances Wright and Stella Thomas.
Through the generosity of our many friends, we can further the work of rebuilding primary schools in Sierra Leone thus delivering on our aims – one of them being, providing a series of educational activities for Sierra Leonean children and young people, in order to cultivate a positive cultural identity and a sense of belonging and in the words of Martin Luther King, “Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education”.
We take this opportunity to wish all our supporters a Happy and Prosperous New Year, with good health, wealth and happiness.
01/08/2008
As preparation for the development of our new implementation framework, the Chair of the Board of Trustees visited Freetown in April/May 2008. Apart from linking up with our Sierra Leone based trustees, Esther Roberts and Yvonne Thompson, she visited schools, spoke to education authorities (Ministry of Education and Freetown City Council) and networked with other charities in Freetown.
A meeting took place on Saturday 3rd May with Yvonne and Esther to discuss the aims of her visit and solicit their ideas about TLBPET’s future strategy in Sierra Leone. Yvonne advised that it was important to set some criteria for the schools we would work with, such as accessibility for monitoring; identifying a limited number initially as ‘pilot projects’ and importantly, raising the local profile of TLBPET and its impact within the community.
With their help and after discussions with the City Council, Ministry of Education and several other education experts in Freetown, two schools were identified as our pilot schools – Regent Rural Community Primary School and Thomas Peters Primary School in Freetown. Professor B. B. Ibrahim and his engineers provided essential support in helping to draw up plans for the refurbishment of these two schools. We are hoping to provide new roofs, windows, classroom furniture, steel doors and in general trying to create a more positive learning environment for the children of these two schools.
We invite any generous friends of education in Sierra Leone to donate funds or resources to enable TLBPET to undertake this work. Regentonians take note!!
The donations were generously provided by School Aid and Perrymount Primary School, Forest Hill.
The primary schools that received donations were:
The secondary schools that benefited from these donations were:
