It's vary sad and painful 😖 to see these our young students do not have any chair to sit or table to write on. I sometimes feel very pity since they are like my own biological sister or brother. You would wonder to ask is whose work to provide these students with the dual chairs? Education by this era is decentralized being the project of the District Assembly to provide through the District Assembly common fund.
The problem is that, when the funds are given to the District Assembly, due to the large number of schools in the District the Assembly need to serve them, the funds are unable to cater for all the schools. Meanwhile there are other areas the Assembly need to divert some of these money to, like Disability funds, feeder roads, health care, school building projects, electricity, disaster management, portable water and other amenities. Looking at these numerous projects it becomes very difficult for the assembly to fulfill all the projects at the catchment area of the District.
Due to these problems, Some schools are sometimes lucky to have favour from philanthropists or Non-governmental Organisations ( NGOs). But this is a handful of schools who have access to these benefits. For the past 5 years, our school - Anansu Presby Junior High School has suffered from getting chairs and tables (Dual desks) for learning. We have written letters severally to the District Assembly to come to our aid. Follow-ups have been done but we've not been getting good response. I remember last year when we had new entrance from Basic 6 to Basic 7 ( Junior High School 1), we couldn't get chairs for them. The students had to sometimes stand hang their Books at the walls to be able to copy their notes or do exercise.
fixing parts of damaged together with nails
We had to rush to Beposo; one of the neighborhood community who had some rejected dual desks. We hired a truck to covey the dual desks to our school. I remember when I counted they were eleven. The students had to manage with the old ones which aren't in good state( about 5). That was even for Basic 1. We ask, what about Basic 8 and Basic 9? They are facing the same problem, but they were having little of the old dual desks to manage for sometime.
Today, we had to sacrifice our time and strength as part of #actsofkindness to fix all the broken parts of these dual desks for our young students. Even though we are Teachers and our main job is to ensure teaching and learning but we must also consider the students welfare. When they have conducive environment, teaching and learning would take place. We asked one of our colleague who is Career Technology Master and practically vested in carpentry work to help fix these dual desks right for our students. He didn't shake his head no!, but went quickly to his shop and brought in his tools: "shaft clamp, saw, hammer, tape measure and nails to begin the repairs."
Tools assembled to begin the repairs of dual desks: shaft clamp, saw, hammer, tape measure and nails
"The process of the repairs of the dual desks" began successfully; with my little support to "Chakka!" as we used to call him, I helped him to use the Clamp hold firmly with the wood when cutting with the saw. Few places were measured using the tape measure. We did a lot of hammering since most parts all the nails had been removed and we needed to fix them. We hammered them tightly and they are now well fixed.
We now have five well fixed dual desks for our students. As we have the tools available, any of these minor repairs can be done without taking to carpentry shop since "Chakka" is a professional Carpenter. We were also able to fix 2 of the stuff chairs which were broken.
Wow!, I'm very excited that we have now accomplishing this tasks even through we still need support of chairs and tables; if some philanthropists or NGOs would come to our aid of mono desks or dual desks we would be thanks. These and other many things that our school need, but we have to tackle it one after the other. We can combine too much requests and just complicate things.
I would have love to support these young students since education is the key to success. As such,one day, one of these my young sister have good position, they would mention my name. It's one of the projects in my heart to get support for these students.
