Pamoja-Leo
On Monday 4th December 2017, former pupil, Georgina Harris-Hill, visited the school to talk to the year 5 and 6 children about the charity she and her husband started in Tanzania called Pamoja-Leo, which means ‘together today’. This is a children’s charity for orphaned or vulnerable children, based within a community that lives on the beach.
Georgina explained how their charity helps to empower children to have a voice and ensure their rights as children can start to be met. She also highlighted that while the surroundings of the children may be very different to children living in Britain their feelings are actually very similar.
Pamoja-Leo currently work with children aged 3 – 6 providing full time education and two meals a day for them, and children aged 10 – 16 as an after school provision. Their next targeted group are the 7 to 10 year olds.
It was fascinating to hear how the children have been given a voice to show what their concerns are and how the older children have been empowered to find and put into action, solutions to their highlighted problems. These included, not having access to clean water, too many children not having access to the after school programmes and bullying. To solve these problems the children were shown how to build and maintain a water filtering system, which they did and maintain so access to clean water is no longer a problem. In order to help other children access education, they became ‘tutors’ and now pass on some of the skills they have been taught. In trying to encourage greater kindness between each other, the children asked the Headmaster if, instead of being punished for being unkind, children could be made to take an act of kindness (all made up by the students) from a box and do what it asked, such as compliment three people during the day. The presentation ended with Georgina telling the children she believed we all have three things we can give to others: our time, our talents and our things.
After school, there were some items for sale which the young people from Pamoja-Leo had made. The profits will help to continue funding the valuable work this charity is doing.
Thanks to Stevenson’s uniform suppliers, we were able to pass on stock of our old PE kit the company had left, so a little part of Alleyn Court will be going back to Tanzania with Georgina. Having re-established contact with Georgina we will be looking for ways in which we can continue to find more out about the work Pamoja-Leo is doing to support some of the vulnerable children in Tanzania.
