At the moment the children of Dickson Children Centre and Onesimus Boys centre go to a school in the district where the homes are located. This is a semi shanty town. Classes contain between 60- 100 children. There are not enough school benches, so the children mostly sit on the floor. School books are shared between 6-8 children and the quality of education is poor. The safety at school is severely deteriorating which isn’t good for our children. The children only go to school in the morning and in the afternoon they are taught by our teacher who is employed by the centre. This teacher teaches 30 children, all in different years at primary school level, at once . This means dividing her attention amongst a lot of children at various levels of education.

We aim at sending the children to a better school in 2008. We have chosen a school with smaller classes, quality of education is better and school hours are all day. This particular school is located in a different district, which means that the children have to be taken to and from school with a bus and that they will have to stay over for lunch. Every child will get its own set of school books and every child will get a uniform of its own.

The amount needed for the education they get at the moment is incorporated in the amount that the sponsors pay now. However, this amount is not sufficient to pay for the new school. For this we have set up an extra budget. From 2008 onward several children will also start secondary education, which also means extra costs.  At each home we have 25 school- going children at the moment. We didn’t count in the toddlers.

The budget is 350,- euro per school year per child. This amount covers: tuition, school uniforms, school books and other necessary school articles.

The total amount needed for both homes for education each year is 17.500,- euro.

Update 2008: Thanks to donations for this project the children have started at another school. It’s a lot of hard work and requires a lot of discipline but the children are very motivated. To keep covering the costs for education in the years ahead funds are still raised for this project.

Update 2009: The Onesimus boys who were not in the last year of primary school started at another school as from January 2009. The boys in their last year of primary school will finish their year at the government school, because the change would be too big to switch to another school for one year only.