The Schools
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It is impossible to give sufficient support to all of the 14 schools in the area where families are so poor that they cannot afford the annual school fee of 50 N$ (5 Euros, 6.50 US$) for their children.
We provide pens, exercise books, used school books etc. and finance a feeding scheme for the children of Mayana Primary School 3 times a week, so that we can at least be sure that the children are getting a meal on those days.
At the moment, about 650 children in grade 1 to 7 attend Mayana Primary School.
After an application period of two years, Mayana Primary School was accepted into the state-run “feeding scheme” that provided the children with a daily meal of maize-meal. This feeding scheme forms an important incentive for parents to send their children to school since often the meal at school is the only meal they are being fed all day, and that being taken care of takes some weight off the parents’ shoulders.
Unfortunately, the scheme ran into financial trouble, and these days there is no feeding scheme in the Kavango region anymore. The feeding is still continued, though, but exclusively through donations paid into the Mayana Map Account. This forms a major part of the expenses at Mayana Primary School since it costs 4400 N$ (just under 500 Euros/660 US$) to feed the children three times a week.
Stephanie Hill of Bermuda financed a fence around the school that cost 100 000 N$. It was thought that the school would now, save from invasion by goats, cows, and stealing neighbours, be able to cultivate their own wheat and vegetables in order to become independent of the donations by N’Kwazi Lodge. Furthermore, we felt that by cultivating and harvesting their own food, the children would learn an important lesson for life.
Currently, we are busy preparing up the fields around the school for the first season of agricultural use.
A generous donation of about 150 000 N$ by tourists from Trier/Germany enabled us to provide running water for the school.
Kayengona Combined School and Shambyu Combined School are two more schools in the area that receive help from the Mayana Mpora Foundation and offer grade 1-7 education as well as higher standard education in grade 8-10.
We are extremely proud to point out that Kayengona Combined Schoool is run by women!
To enable children from a less privileged background to attend school, parents are asked to make contributions of a non-financial nature to the school, such as bringing in firewood or helping with the preparation of the maize-meal for the feeding scheme to substitute for the school money.
The group of mothers in charge of cooking changes every week, and in return for their assistance they each receive a small bag of maize meal for their families at the end of the week.
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