The Vice Principal’s Blog

Mr Dobson, Ms Langworthy and four 6^th form students Lauren Scoltock, Georgia Stanley, Daniel Rands and Cevdet Karapinar travelled to Swaziland to visit our link schools and see how our Advent Charity appeal money had been spent.

We travelled overnight on the 30 June arriving at Manzini at 3.30pm the following afternoon. We were met by Sizwe Ndlangamandia the Swaziland CharitableTrust field worker. Who ably looked after us for our stay.

Our first venue was St Francis Secondary School where we spent two days. Students stayed with host families and attended school with them, spoke in assembly on both mornings. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves and got on well with all the students.

The photos show them in assembly and in lessons. Assembly is outside and it is winter in Swaziland – which is why Lauren looks cold!

Next up was Hho Hho AME Primary School which is in the north of the country and in a rural area. Following the Bacon’s trip last year we had provided the money for them to build a kitchen to feed their children. We were pleased to see that it had been built and was in use. We were able to paint the inside and outside over the weekend and then ‘see it in action’ on the Monday feeding the 512 children with bean soup.

Before:

During:

After:

We also did a ‘make over’ on the Grade 7 classroom. Our students in year 9 textiles had made bags for each child based on the theme ‘urban London’. These were placed one on each desk and filled with a Swazi pencil, pen, rubber, pencil sharpener, magnifying glass, ruler, balloon, bookmark (designed by Daniel Rands), packet coloured pencils and a Swazi badge.

We had posters to put up on the walls and Mr Dobson painted a typical English scene in the corner of the back wall.

We had visited Redriff Primary school earlier in the year to find out what teaching aids would be most useful to take and we purchased these with some of the appeal money. These were left on the teacher’s desk.

The students and teachers were thrilled with the room and resources.

Mavis Mazibuko (the Headteacher) took the time to explain to all the teachers how to use the resources and even had us copying some of the posters so they could go up in other classrooms!

We found time to play, read and generally enjoy ourselves.