St John's College School continues to support a primary school located in the remote, rural community of Ayensuako in southern Ghana as of the charity Humanitas’ Education Matters programme. Anna Butterworth from Humanitas visited St John's to provide an update for our pupils to learn about the success of the project with talks in assembly and workshops for some year groups. Anna shared with them that the school buildings at Ayensuako have now been painted and a library is being established which will be used by the entire village.
As part of the assemblies, St John's children found out that in Ayensuako families live in basic mud huts without electricity or sanitation and do their best to live off the land. It is three hours’ drive from the nearest city and Ayensuako has no infrastructure or local trade so life in the village is a daily struggle for survival. The school caters for 140 children providing them with full-time education and a chance to break the cycle of poverty in their community. One Senior House child reflected, “In the Humanitas workshop, I learnt that children in some countries like Ghana do not have any toys and make them from recycled materials and we had the chance to design our own.” Another child said, “I learnt that you don’t just have to go to the shop to get toys you can save the environment and use some of the recycled materials you do not need any more and also your biggest resource, your imagination.”
In Anna's words “Ayensuako is a community in which people weave dreams from their own determination and aspiration.”
Old textbooks were recently gathered and taken from St John’s to Ayensuako for the children to use. The £490 raised at Form 4’s Victorian Fayre will go towards Humanitas’ Christmas campaign which aims to provide each child with a brand new school pack for 2019, which will include a school bag, a complete stationery set and notebooks. “A gift that will not only wow them on Christmas morning but will be theirs to use as they continue through education.”