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It’s Only Words...
We tend to take books for granted in the UK. They are a luxury in Lesotho. Jenny Dobson and the children of St Nicolas’ School are delighted to have been able to answer the prayers of Mrs Florence Mangeni, the Ugandan founder and head teacher of the ‘Tree of Life’ School in Maseru, the capital of this mountainous kingdom in South Africa. Jenny has done much more at St Nicolas’ School than teach music for the past twelve years. She makes a significant difference by instilling in her pupils a love of and appreciation for music in particular and for performance in general that will never leave them. Recently she has applied her immense goodwill and creativity in Lesotho through a different medium – the written word. She first visited Lesotho in 2007 with a colleague, Craig Atkinson. While helping at the ‘Beautiful Gate’ orphanage and care centre for abandoned children in Maseru, she learned that Lesotho is no bigger than Wales, it is one of the poorest countries in the world, a quarter of its two million people are HIV positive and Aids has made orphans of some 360,000 children. She also discovered a cultural disconnection – many British people liked to give ‘things’ to help but what the ‘Beautiful Gate’ needs most is money to pay its staff, to erect and repair its buildings and to pay for (very expensive) electricity, water and food. All Jenny and Craig could give at the time was their time and effort. She has since become the UK Ambassador and Fundraiser for ‘Beautiful Gate’ and in February this year she returned there as a volunteer for a month. Naturally, Jenny couldn’t resist visiting the ‘Tree of Life’ Primary School and Pre-School across the road. She discovered that, in Lesotho, education is a privilege nobody takes lightly and, while the state schools are free, they teach an English-style curriculum to very large classes of over 50 children. The ‘Tree of Life’ is about the same size as St Nicolas’ – about 200 children – but by charging parents a small fee to cover its costs it can keep classes to between 30 and 40 children. When Jenny asked Mrs Mangeni what ‘things’ she needed most, without hesitation she said ‘books’. Although her pupils are taught to read they have no storybooks to spark their imagination. Later their lives will be about working every daylight hour to survive and most homes have no electricity to give them light to read at night, so the only chance children have to practise their reading and widen their eyes is at school. When she got home, Jenny went into action. St Nicolas’ School needed no persuasion to donate some old books and she encouraged children to bring in many more. She selected those which were culturally-suited to Lesotho and sold the others to raise funds to buy pencils, crayons, rubbers and sharpeners. And in August she set off south again armed with letters from St Nicolas’ children and three large suitcases crammed with books and stationery. Mrs Mangeni was close to tears when she opened the cases. She had never seen so many books in the whole time she had been teaching in Lesotho. And there was a pack of stationery for each of her seven classes. Jenny says it was a real privilege to have been able to bless this lady and her pupils in this way, but she won’t rest on her laurels. She intends to raise enough money to buy a printer when she goes back to Maseru next year. Watch this space... Jenny Dobson