Charity Work in a School in The Gambia

I have just returned from The Gambia! I've been out in West Africa working for a charity called F.R.O.G.S (friends of Gambian schools). It's a brilliant charity that works with over 100 schools all over Tha Gambia, working to improve education for children throughout the country. For those of you that don't know, I had raised £1000 to go and transform some classrooms in Bijilo Lower Basic School by cleaning, white-washing and painting their learning resources onto the walls. The school cannot afford to provide the children with textbooks so this enabled all children to access the learning...

The Gambia Girls team!

The classroom before we got our hands on it. The floors were crumbling away with huge holes in, the walls were dirty and bare... but not for long!

After a lot of elbow grease, we scrubbed, rinsed and white-washed the walls all ready for the learning resources to be painted onto them!

The respiratory system

Please excuse my hair and general scruffy appearance, when you're working hard in the 40 degree heat of Africa, there is no time for beautifying!

Adult and milk teeth diagrams, a cross-section of skin and the excretory system.

Traditional costumes of The Gambia

An 8-point compass with a cheeky elephant to help the children remember :)

The new improved chalk board

The Gambian crest

A map of The Gambia

We left our own little signatures to mark our hard work, each of us printed our hand and wrote our name

The most rewarding part was letting the children back into their new classroom and straight away they started using the resources on the walls. Here is a boy reading aloud the poem "you are what you eat" that we painted onto the wall.

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

The Head Teacher Mr Fatty and one of the teachers, Lamin, with some children enjoying the resources that we provided the school with!

I had the most incredible time in The Gambia, and already almost all of us are talking about returning to Africa again! I suspect that we will all be bogged down with a million things when we enter our NQT year of teaching so it might have to wait, but one day I will be going back!