Welcome to our School.
Mirembe preparatory School is a child born of African friends servce Communities (AFSCO).The school is located in Kamira Village,Butagaya Sub County near the Police Station in Jinja District. We started this project to get help for our children who are disavataged in the communities.
The school is not well built,we are still in temporary sturtures but with volunteers help, we hope to build permanetly structures.
There are about 100 children at the school and 4 teachers, ranging from 20 to 40 pupils. The beginning classes range from Nursery, Primary one , and Primary two.
Many of our pupils are orphans or partial orphans. Life expectancy is 48. There are 1.5 million AIDS orphans in Uganda. Orphans are the least privileged in the extended family. They go to poor schools such as ours. They are the last to benefit in the home, do more chores than the parents' natural children, receive less food, are tired and less able to concentrate.
Parents provide uniforms, textbooks and stationery, so they are unable to send all the children to school at the same time.
Ugandan Schools have very few teaching and learning resources. Textbooks are expensive. Pupils spend most of their time copying from the board or share one book.
Our children are well behaved, fun and studious.
Before the volunteer project, children didn’t have breakfast so their concentration was poor , but now free porridge is provided for every child, every day.
The free porridge is given to our children and fundings are from the parents,couchsurfers,volunteers and welwishers.It has greatly improved our pupils' health and their ability to concentrate in the class.
We started our volunteer project because we need your support. Working with us either in the School or Community lifts our morale, provides us with extra 'man' power, innovations, ideas and gives us contact with the wider world. Just by coming to us with good hearts, you help us hugely.
Priorities for the Development of our School – Feb 2015
Now we have one temporary structures, we desperately need to add on one permantly structure with three classes equiped with desks by the end of this year 2015 before we add on primary three and primary four in 2016.
Below is a prioritised list for the development of the school and our needs.
We always need Secondhand Laptops for teaching IT skills for pupils and teachers as well as for teachers to make materials for teaching. We only have 1 very old secondhand laptops and even with the numbers of pupils in our school we manage to teach some skills to our older children. This is a great advantage for our rural children. Children in rural schools never normally get such help.
We would be so grateful if you would bring us working secondhand laptops with Office and Excel so that we can continue teaching IT skills. You could bring them in your rucksacks, suitcases. Some of our teachers are also now using it - never having had their hands on a computer before! They're getting better and better at it!
Ugandan school budgets don't even have enough funding for basic needs, let alone IT yet IT skills are essential to equip our children for the modern world otherwise we will just fall further and further behind. Please help us with this if you can.
We need laptops with Windows operating system - no earlier Windows Vista. It would be very helpful if these laptops already has Microsoft office installed or at least MS Word and Excel (Not Open Office). If you are also able to bring us copies of MS Office & Key, that would be excellent.
We need text books for all classes.In total and covering all subjects we need about 200 new text books but obviously we don't expect these all to be bought at once! They can be bought in very small lots.And we also need pens, pencils,books and colouring pencils.
We are deeply grateful for the help we receive, but most of all we are just very glad volunteers care enough to travel so far to be with us. It really helps our morale.
Read on to the Volunteer Project page to learn how we are using this project to help our children and the community and how you too might help us to help them.