Sunday, October 7th 2007
Mary Rose School and The New Horizon Special School in Accra, Ghana.
This year we supported New Horizon Special School in Ghana. It is a special school for young people with learning disabilities from the age of 2yrs to 40yrs. They do not receive any funding from the government and are entirely dependent on charitable donations. The children pay to go to school and have to be able to provide themselves with basic items in order to attend the school. Some of our class groups are setting up links with the school, writing to each other and making things to send to the pupils.
A previous member of Mary Rose staff spent a month with the school during the summer term. They helped them to structure their lessons, prepare resources and set up PE activities. The school of well over 100 pupils/students has only 1 working computer and very few classroom resources. The school runs an enterprise workshop where they make cane stools, baskets, tablecloths and lengths of fabrics dyed by hand. They sent us a selection which is on display in school.
Our Harvest Festival was a wonderful occasion and the number of gifts brought in by pupils and their families and staff was overwhelming. These will soon be winging their way over to Accra. At our Harvest service we saw photographs and video clips of the New Horizon pupils, we played our African drums along with them as they played on the video. Parent governors received the gifts on behalf of the New Horizon School and nearly 50 parents and friends came along to the service to show their support.
Do take a look at our photograph album to see more …….