South Sudan needs Education to Defeat Tribalism, Illiteracy, and poverty for future generation. please join us to build a peaceful future!
Progress at Mairo Primary School Omilling South Sudan:Work has been going on well at Mairo, and the first double classroom block is completed.
The building teams have been very committed, and everyone has worked hard. The water ladies have had to carry water over a half KM on their heads as we have been waiting for the borehole to be drilled.
In June of 2013, the society at Omilling moulded the foundation bricks, then fired them in the kiln in July, and building work started in August. The site builder recommended the kiln bricks to construct the foundation because it protects the building from collapsing and underground water. The wall will be built using interlocking soil blocks. The team, lead by Francis and Claudio, produced interlocking soil blocks on a voluntary basis. It was really exciting to see the daily progress and everything ran like planned. There was a really happy atmosphere at Mairo Primary School, and it was always a pleasure to meet the team. This was a perfect project which much of the funds was donated by Trolltech foundation, and we would love to more of this sort of projects happen in the future. We left Omilling just before the two classroom was open, but it is now up and running for children, and the community of Omilling will be forever grateful. Francis and his team will continue to produce 500 soil blocks a day, using interlocking machine. Their aim is to make 16000 soil blocks for future building needs.
We still need lots of help with funds as want to continue with construction uninterrupted. As soon as the two built classroom was open, the pressure to build the remaining six classrooms increased tremendously. We are grateful to our donors who have been involved with fundraising activity, and we hope you are pleased with these initial results.
| Qty | Detail | Unit $ | Total $ |
| 2 | Classrooms block | 10500 | 21000 |
| 2 | Toilet block | 3500 | 7000 |
| 1 | Teacher’s house | 19000 | 19000 |
Cost of construction materials continues to rise (1 bag cement now costs $25 in Juba).
We still need help to make 160 desks at a cost of $45 each, and any contribution towards books a full set of textbooks for a student is $100 for a year.
If you want to raise funds online for a marathon or any other event, you can easily set up your own fundraising page at GlobalGiving or Globalgiving UK. See a link on our home page.
Micro-Loans
For several years, we have thought that Beekeeping would be a great project to run, this last visit has been very enlightening. In our approach to protect the environment, we need to establish a viable concept to keep so that Omilling community could see the value of maintaining forests rather than cutting down trees. Honestly, forests don’t immediately offer villages much benefit and, when they see an area full of trees, they would cut them down to grow maize rather than keeping it.
We had a very lengthy meeting with Padiak Okot Paul, a beekeeper from Uganda, who has set up a honey -producing project in Yei, and he gave us lots of information about bee-keeping in South Sudan. Our vision is to establish groups of bee-keepers who will look after beehives in selected forestry areas. These bee-keepers will be enabled with a loan from HOPE OFIR IHA,which will be paid in a year, to purchase individually up to 10 beehives. They will then realize the value of maintaining the forests and will naturally protect the forest from bush fires and deforestation while making money from honey. The project started three years before, but the monkeys destroyed Langstroth beehives. There will be 50 beehives and 10 members to start up, and Rekele Dudud is our first bee-keeper entrepreneur to request for a loan. HOPE OFIRIHA will gain valuable knowledge on the viability of this sort of business so that we can hopefully establish many bee-keeper entrepreneurs in a future.
