Archive for May, 2012
31 May 2012
2nd Spend it Well Teacher Training Workshop
The 20 teachers from the 4 schools where Spend it Well works, have now attended their second 2 day training workshop. Lke the previous one, this workshop focused on how to teach numeracy, building on what the teachers learnt in the previous workshop. Once again bright and fabulous games feature in the teaching and were given to the teachers to take back to their schools. The feedback from the teachers has been fantastic.
     
project: Lequeracabu'u East Timor, Macalaco East Timor, Maucale East Timor, OSTICO EAST TIMOR
23 May 2012
In Dili for East Timor’s 10th anniversary
It’s not every day you get to be part of a country’s 10th anniversary celebrations.
What was the most amazing part of it for me? Not the red, black and yellow flags and bunting festooned all around Dili. Not being at the same events as the Indonesian and Portugese Presidents – or spotting the Governor General in stylish pastel pink. The sight that will stay with me for a long time is that of thousands of people lining both sides of the road as they walked late at night to Tasi Tolu, the area on the outskirts of Dili where a ceremony was held at midnight on the eve of the anniversary. Over 100,000 people gathered around the stage, trying to catch a glimpse of the speeches on a few large screens and marvelling at the fireworks which concluded it. For such a young country, where memories of violence are still recent, the celebrations were of huge significance.
    
project: Lequeracabu'u East Timor, Macalaco East Timor, Maucale East Timor, OSTICO EAST TIMOR
14 May 2012
Our new school project – Lospalos
My kids’ school in Brisbane has 350 children in 15 classrooms plus music room, library, hall etc etc. Lospalos primary school has 848 students in 7 run-down classrooms – and nothing else.
Even with the teachers running 3 shifts over 12 hours every day, each of the children at Lospalos primary school is only getting a couple of hours’ schooling a day. Our project for 2012 is to build a new 3 classroom building for the school to help ease this chronic overcrowding.
Lospalos is a city of 28,000 people. Unlike some of our other, more remote, projects where limited road access means only a semi- permanent building is possible, we are able to build a permanent building at Lospalos with concrete walls, glass windows etc.
The total cost will be USD$65,000 and we plan to have this built within the next few months. We already have donations for over half of this amount, but are currently working to raise the remaining USD$30,000.
  
10 May 2012
New uniforms for kids at Macalaco School
At last year’s opening ceremony for the classrooms we built at Macalaco School, I felt sad to see how old the kid’s school uniforms were. Obviously washed with care by their mothers, they were spotlessly clean but the white shirts looked old and grey and many kids were wearing non-uniform shorts or skirts.
In a great example of how far money can go in East Timor, Spend it Well just bought 3 shirts and 2 skirts or shorts for each of the 100 children – for a grand total of $1,100 (about the price to outfit one Aussie child at a private school). Carefully packaged by Agostinho for each child, they were presented to the children recently. I love the photos (the little boy did get a better sized shirt!)
     
cheap Confido
project: Macalaco East Timor
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