The Wye Valley School was invited, several years ago, to set up a partnership with a school in Lusaka, Zambia. The aim of the partnership was to develop young leaders in both schools and to give them opportunities to work together, thereby promoting understanding between young people from very different cultures. The project has grown over the years and now has many different aspects to it. For th
e first four years Sixth Form students went to visit Libala High School to train their students to be Sports Leaders and Student Mentors. We also supported the school by taking out 24 computers to enable them to set up an IT suite, a range of equipment and resources to enable them to deliver practical Science lessons throughout the school and laptops with projectors so that they could use the many programmes that our students use on a daily basis. At the end of each of our visits the Libala students would organise Sports Festivals for the young children in their local Basic Schools. There would be over 200 children at these festivals and for them this was their only opportunity to do any organised PE as this subject is not part of their curriculum. Through these festivals we set up links with the local Basic schools. After four years we decided that our programme was not a partnership. We had been going to Zambia but the Libala students had not had the chance to come to the UK and to visit Wye Valley. There was no chance of them being able to pay to come here so we took on the challenge of raising the money to pay for their flight tickets and invited them to stay in our homes. February 2011 saw the arrival of the first group of 15 students and 2 teachers from Libala at Wye Valley. While they were with us they visited local Primary schools, they spoke at the District Rotary Conference in Birmingham, they visited many of the sights of London and saw the sea for the first time at Brighton. They also spoke to the students at Wye Valley and performed at an assembly to the whole school which was a truly memorable occasion. For them the visit was a life-changing experience as the visits to their school had been for our students. This successful occasion set the pattern for our future programme which we now feel we can say is a true partnership. Last year we visited Libala again. While we were there we also worked in the Basic schools and are now forming partnerships between these schools and some of our feeder schools. We also visited the Luyando Orphanage where we were horrified at the poverty and hardship that the children had to suffer. We have also expanded our links with the Rotary organisation. We have been supported in many ways by the Rotary Club of Bourne End and Cookham and have been able to build links for Libala with Rotary clubs in Lusaka in the hopes that they might also support them as Bourne End and Cookham have supported us. We now support Chilenje Basic School and their special needs department with the help of Bardwell School in Bicester. We also support a Transient home (orphanage) plus many other community projects. Please contact us if you would like to become involved.
