By Bridget Higginson | Executive Officer, HATW
Thank you for supporting our Covid appeal. We're pleased to report that most of the children who participate in the activities run by our partners in Benin, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and India are now back in school and college. Thanks to your support the various centres and schools we work with are able to follow precautionary measures and help keep everyone safe.
Of all the countries where our partner projects are located, it is the children in India who have suffered the longest school closures (17 months now). This has been a huge loss for the children of the New Life Centre (NLC), Sarberia - a rural area in West Bengal. NLC staff have remained busy throughout, monitoring the childrens’ progress as they learn in these exceptionally difficult circumstances; without a regular source of electricity, nowhere to study at home and, for the most part, parents who cannot help with home-schooling as they never went to school themselves. Access to online lessons has been impossible for all but a few of the older pupils who have access to a smart phone. The younger children especially have missed out on a great deal this past year and a half. Hopefully, that is about to change as schools prepare to reopen for all pupils at long last.
Mr Naskar, Founder and Director of the New Life Centre in Sarberia is putting everything in place to welcome the children back to school later this month and thanks to your support, the school will have everything they need to help keep pupils and staff safe (facemasks, sanitiser, cleaning products, thermometers etc).
The New Life Centre also offers vocational training in tailoring. This has already reopened and is proving popular with 12 trainees currently enrolled. The course offers the opportunity for girls who are no longer in school or college to learn a skill and ultimately to start a small business.
Since the start of the pandemic, the demand for computer training has increased significantly and they are also planning to start job-oriented computer training for young people. To get this started they are in the process of fixing up 4 PCs.
Thank you for supporting HATW and our partners through this difficult time, let’s hope there are brighter days ahead.
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