Good News from Lemlem Baro School
Mothering Matters Switzerland has been supporting the registered Swiss charity, Ethiopian Enterprises over the last two years with financial contributions and by coordinating a book drive in 2016 for the new library at the Lemlem Baro School.
What a year 2016 was for Ethiopian Enterprises, its board members and supporters, and the school community of Lemlem Baro Elementary School.
The first six months of the year were filled with challenges. Just after New Year, I received an emergency message from the government of Raya – the region in which the town of Mohoni and Lemlem Baro School are situated. They asked if we could provide additional financial help to the community at the peak of the terrible drought which had started six months earlier. We knew the drought would be bad at the end of 2015 when the rains failed to materialize and the crops were destroyed. But by January 2016 the death toll had started to rise. Children were coming to school and collapsing from hunger and thirst at their desks, and many of the desperate farmers who lived some hours away from the town could no longer afford to pay their children’s room rental during the week to enable them to attend school. They were starting to send the children to relatives in other regions or to find work in the towns. The drought was the worst in 35 years, and Ethiopian Enterprises decided to set up an emergency fund to support nearly 500 particularly vulnerable students and their families, spread across 22 schools, until the final June exams were over. Many of the students would have had to leave school if we hadn’t intervened. We have since heard that some of the students we helped in this way have gone on to secure places and scholarships at university which they would have missed if they had left before their final exams last June. The rains returned in July, and the good harvest in autumn saw the return of hope.
The drought led to delays in the completion of our second building phase at Lemlem, as for several months lorries were used primarily for delivering emergency food aid all over northern Ethiopia. Fuel prices rocketed, and water was scarce. Due to the water-collection tanks at Lemlem Baro, our school looked like an oasis for a fair part of the drought year, which made us feel quite guilty. However, it also proved to the entire community that what we were doing could help save lives in the future, and this has eased our pathway towards the planned rollout of the rainwater collection component of the school project. But let me reassure you: when the town water supply broke down for a couple of weeks putting thousands of children at risk, we delivered emergency water supplies to all the schools in the town.
In March, after several of the Mothering Matters Switzerland team had helped us prepare many of the English books we had collected for the school, they were finally sent on their way. You can see some of the students here reading them in the new school library, of which they are immensely proud. The double library space has been divided into a reading room and a bookshelf/browsing room. Most of the shelving has been completed now, a lengthy undertaking because good carpenters are rare in Ethiopia, and because wood was scarce following the drought.
The official opening of the grade five through eight buildings, the library, storerooms and staffrooms took place on 5 October. The event was attended by the school community, the regional government and education officials. Then, in December, the school enclosure was finally completed and I was able to formally accept this important construction a week before Christmas. This was important for the community, not only to protect the school and its water resources from roaming farm stock and unauthorized intruders, but also because its completion meant that long-year border disputes with the adjoining farmers were settled by the government as a prerequisite for the construction.
So, are there no problems at the school? Of course there are. One challenge is the attitude of teachers and education officials to kindergarten teaching. This is looked down upon, the feeling being that small children should just be “babysat” until it’s time to go home. However, after discussing this with the education office, and delivering a workshop especially for kindergarten teachers, we’ve seen change. We hope to build a separate kindergarten within the Lemlem Baro compound this year, which will enable us to generate more interest in KG education.
We’re moving forward at Lemlem Baro and in the Raya community in general. Ethiopian Enterprises is greatly indebted to all those of you who have contributed to our work this year in many different ways. On behalf of the Lemlem Baro School community and the board of Ethiopian Enterprises, I’d like to thank you very, very much. We wish you all a healthy, happy, and fulfilling 2017.
By Lesley Stephenson, Mohoni School Project Leader
Lesley is a corporate communications trainer, author and event speaker. She is also an English teacher who specializes in working with non-native speakers. She co-founded the recognized Swiss charity, Ethiopian Enterprises, in 2009, and leads the charity’s Mohoni School Project. Visit her website to read more about her speaking and training programs, and her charity website to learn more about her work in Ethiopia.
Photos by Thomas Baumann & André Cardinaux, Ethiopian Enterprises.
