|
Home
| |
Siavonga Fishing Village Community School
During the Easter
holidays, Sarah, Caroline and Jools visited Zambia to start making the
preparations for the expedition. Part of the Pre-visit was to establish which
project we would undertake. During the pre-visit, we looked at four different
projects.
After we returned to the
UK, the leader team discussed the four projects, and we have chosen a project to
build a new school at the Siavonga Fishing Village Community School.
The reasons for choosing this project include :-
-
The fishing village is home to around 300 families, mainly living in basic
constructed buildings
-
Currently, the nearest primary school is around 8km’s away in the main town
of Siavonga. All children aged 5 – 14 from the fishing village have to walk
this distance to school and back everyday. The very young children usually
do not make it to school as it is too far, and end up playing on the
roadside.
-
The new school is to provide children aged 5 – 7 with their first three
years of education, local to the village.
-
The school is to be considered as a community resource, providing a venue
facility, and a place for vaccinations, baby weighing and other medical
checks to be located.
-
The village has no clean water supply, and they currently have to
collect their dirty water from the lake, which involves around a 150mtr
climb back to the village. The water at the lake has issues, as it is the
same location where people wash clothes, and there are also hippo's and
croc's in the area (which have been known to attack people).
- The nearest
school in Siavonga is heavily over used, and currently has too many children
to cope with (especially in the younger years). This new school will help
ease the burden on the main Siavonga school.
The Zambia 2010
project is hoping to provide :-
-
A double classroom block, with store and office for use by 5 - 7 year old
children.
-
An additional small room on the classroom block, to be used for visiting
medical personnel.
-
A toilet block.
-
A water
project.
-
A double teachers accommodation block.
A very early estimation of
all of these work is around £26,000. However, please note this is a VERY early
estimate. We are very keen to get the local people involved in this project, and
this may reduce some of this total.
Challenges
We do have some significant challenges on this project, not withstanding just
trying to achieve the above fundraising and building program. One of these is
that we have to make sure that the school is built on land that has legal title
for the school. The DAO (head of Siavonga District Council which owns the land),
has given us assurances that a plot of land has already been assigned for a
school, and that the land title will be quickly issued to the Education
department.
Photo's
Because the plot of land was not actually marked out, we unfortunately, do not
have any photo's of the precise location for the new school.
The picture below shows
the aerial view of the Siavonga area (which is surrounded by Lake Kariba). The
Kariba dam can be seen on the right hand edge of the picture, along with part of
the border with Zimbabwe (the white line). The main town of Siavonga is at the
bottom of the land mass, just to the left of the middle of the photo.
The Fishing village is to
the left of the land mass, where as the nearest school is to the right of the
main Siavonga Town.
The Fishing village can be
just seen in the photo below. This is just above, and just to the left of the
middle of the photo. The villagers have to walk to the lake to fetch their
water, but water the photo doesn't show is the 150mtr climb back up to the
village.
 |
GT
