Bazen – Oct 2011

In October 2011 Project Pencil Case was  delighted to be able provide  Bazen Complete Primary School School with books and shelves (from UK Funding).

PPC was led to help  two schools – Bazen Complete Primary School and Ezana Elementary School through valuable local Axum educational connections that knew first hand which schools needed specific help.  The local education department is usually able to only just and very basically fund and equip schools by providing land, basic school buildings and salaries for teachers.  Other essential and standard western resources are often lacking such as chairs and desks, books, stationary and uniforms – it is then up to the schools to fundraise and seek community support to obtain these items.

Project Pencil Case has been fundraising for these two schools for the past year and have recently been able to supply over 1000 books and shelving to the school libraries of these two schools.  Bazen had just a few shelves of books and Ezana had no books at all…

The great thing is that although we expected only to be helping the students who after all are at the heart of our charity, these books also helped the teachers with lesson planning and they appeared to be just as excited about the arrival of these books as the students were!

We were really pleased to also be able to source all the books locally from the one bookstore in town and to get the shelves made by local craftsmen thereby helping the local economy, which made a difference to this small town and was appreciated.