In 2003,
Marcelin Nirere created the very first nursery school in Musha. The St. Laurent Nursery School consisted of
80 children crowded onto Marceline’s porch where they learned the basics in
French, English and Kinyarwanda. A lot
of has changed in the last 10 years and the small school that started on a
porch is almost unrecognizable, in the best way possible. In 2008, thanks to funding from Westwood Collegiate,
the St. Laurent Nursery School was taken from Marceline’s porch to two small
classrooms. Now, five years later, thanks
to amazing efforts by seven students from the University of Edinburgh in
Scotland, the two small classrooms have been joined by a fully stocked library,
a rain water catch system and play structures of every type!
The quest
for the next chapter of the St Laurent Nursery School started last
September. Thanks to a wonderful group of
university students I met in Rwanda in 2009, I learned about the Edinburgh
Global Partnership (EGP), a program that has Edinburgh University students
fundraise for projects and then go overseas to help them come to life. I submitted a proposal for the St.Laurent
Nursery School and hoped for the best. A
few months later, I got a lovely little email saying my proposal had been accepted
and seven eager students began fundraising to make the next chapter of the St.
Laurent Nursery School a reality. The
project budget was set at 3500GBP and they did any and everything to reach
their goal, including bake sales, a pub night, a marathon run in a Princess Peach
costume (from Super Mario brothers), a hitch hike race from Edinburgh to Paris,
and a bungee jump in a cow costume!
In early
June, all seven of the students made their way over to Rwanda to break ground
and get their hands dirty! We managed to
secure a home in Musha and every morning we were up at the crack of dawn to
walk the 40 minutes to the nursery school. The
first week, we spent the entire time clearing the field of bushes and massive
trees! The pictures don’t quite do it
justice but it was grueling work. By day
two, everyone had managed to get some good solid blisters and by day five, we
were almost naturals with a hoe and a machete.
Luckily there were some skilled locals on hand to show us to it should
actually be done! Once the field was cleared, the rest of time
flew by as we designed and built play structures for the kids. By the end of the three weeks, we had the
sweetest play structures in all of Rwanda.
Check out the pictures to appreciate the full extent of it, but
basically we created not one but two tire mountains, a platform with a tree
ladder, an awesome rope ladder and a slide, 4 tire swings, 3 pull up bars, a
suspended bridge and a bunch of colourful tires! How awesome does that sound? Check out the slide show below to see the project come to life!
On our last
day, we had a big open house celebration.
We invited the parents to come see all the work that had been done and
also give them a chance to see how well their children are doing with their
studies. The kids got all dressed up in
new uniforms that we were able to fund and they put on a wonderful singing and
dancing session for the parents. We then
gave the parents a full tour of all the new play structures and the
library! They were beyond thrilled! We had a great meeting with all the parents
and one of the best things to come out of the whole experience is that many of
the parents are on board for contributing school fees so that Marceline can
hire and train a second teacher.
Marceline will continue on with the older students and the new recruit
will start teaching the little ones. The
parents were extremely thankful for all the work and are eager to do their part
to give their kids the best possible education.
Marceline was extremely grateful for all the additions and especially
for the play structures as now she’ll get a bit of a break from teaching while
the kids use up some of their overflowing energy playing on the
structures. As the EGP students
fundraised well beyond the target, we were able to fund uniforms for all
the students, buy chalk, print out a supply of report cards, make an official
stamp for the school, install a fence, make two new signs for the school and
lots of other little extras to make life easier for Marceline and help her keep
doing the amazing work she is doing.
Overall, the
project was successful beyond my wildest dreams! I have to give a HUGE thanks to all seven of
the amazing volunteers (Ella, Georgia, Harry, Jenni, Patrick, Yii, Yuria) for
all their hardwork and to all the local workers we worked with on the project!!
Everyone was amazing!!!
Definitely
check out the pictures and stay tuned for videos on youtube!
