Lerang'wa School

Raising Funds for Lerangwa in 2010

Visit to Lerang'wa - Summer 2009

Food Aid Delivered to Lerang'wa 2009

Visit to Lerang'wa - Summer 2008

Visit to Lerang'wa Summer 2007

Tanzania Expedition 2008 - Planning

Introduction by Rob Davey Headmaster 1995 - 2007

In 2004 our team came back from a World Challenge Trip to Africa enthusing about the adventures and opportunities they had experienced but with a feeling that their community service contribution had been rather ephemeral.

We had considered this to be a very important part of the Challenge and so we asked ourselves if there was another more effective way to help in a community and if we, as a school with Christian values and a Christian ethos’ were living out the vision of our founders in today’s world.

We decided that we should identify a long-term project that would commit the whole school community. It would be ongoing and each time a team returned to Caterham they would tell the lower school about their experiences so gradually the School would take ownership of the project.

We were able to identify a project through the work of a former pupil. In 2005 John Grimshaw told me about Lerang’wa School in Tanzania on the foothills of Kilimanjaro. He originally started supporting the school when he first moved there some ten years previously. He had gone to this part of Tanzania whilst doing research for his Oxford doctorate, which was a thesis on the ecology of the Afromontane forest of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He lived there for several years studying the forest and its elephants. It is in an extremely rural area about 3 ½ hours from Arusha, which is the capital of the Arusha region in the north of Tanzania. Most of the roads to Lerang’wa are unmade, there is no paid employment and the people are dependent on their crops and domestic livestock for income and subsistence. With an uncertain rainfall their situation is unpredictable from year to year.

In 1993 John’s parents went to visit him and saw the conditions of the school and adjacent dispensary – no electricity, no water, barren classrooms and an extremely basic dispensary. They returned to England and set about raising funds to extend the village water pipeline to the school and dispensary and to build another classroom. They realized that a long-term regular input was required and this would have to come through some form of partnership.

Could this be the project we were searching for? In 2006 I travelled out to the school with John and my wife, Ann, to meet the school head, pupils and education authorities to discuss the proposal. It was as John had described - very rural, still with no electricity and only a standpipe for water, classrooms devoid of equipment of any kind and virtually no sports facilities – one football for 400 pupils!! However, in spite of their poverty the local Masai people, who have begun to leave their nomadic life, were extremely warm and welcoming.

Thirteen 6th form pupils and four staff will go out in summer 2007 to launch the project. They will do practical tasks around the school, teach some English, play sport with the pupils and in turn, they will learn about the Maasai culture. The teaching staff will assist with training local teachers and examine future possibilities for the project.

Caterham has started to raise funds to help Lerang’wa School and that is an essential component but I am particularly pleased that we are able to devote time and effort to helping these Masai children.