Zimbabwe – St Theresa’s Mission School

St Theresa’s Mission School, Rusape, Zimbabwe

This project was to refurbish a primary and secondary school and, in particular, its School Hall. Additionally, as the school is situated high in the mountains, we wanted to provide a lorry for the use of both schools to aid student’s attendance, links with other schools and to provide transport for equipment and building materials.

Both schools were badly affected by storm damage including the destruction of two classroom blocks: one primary and one secondary. The project was to rebuild the primary block and to refurbish other classrooms that had been badly damaged by termites. This required much plastering and painting and repairing of the school furniture. A trustee volunteered to go out for 6th months to manage the project (you can read Bills blogs HERE). Dianne also visited on two occasions (read her blogs HERE).

The destroyed classroom block being rebuilt:

Termite infested classrooms being refurbished – see gallery for more pics.

 

Classrooms refurbished !

The mission school has a School Hall that serves ECU, Primary and Secondary. But as the school was over-full and a lack of classrooms the ECU (early years) needed to use it as their classroom. However, due to a lack of fencing cows and goats roamed the area and were frequently using the Hall as a toilet. So, fencing became a necessity to protect the children but also the school – especially after all the hard work completed to renovate it. The school was fenced.

The Hall was renovated so it could be once again be used for the whole school – assemblies, graduations etc. But there was also a plan to hire it out for weddings, baptisms etc to raise revenue, being so close to the church was a great community asset.

Additionally, we were able to provide 5 laptops and several mobile phones to the school.

Internet was almost non-existent so we negotiated with the Bishop who agreed to donate his Satellite dish to the school, it was an interesting challenge to remove it from the Bishops house and re-locate it at the school – see the Gallery (Satellite)

Refurbishing the school required early starts in the morning and generally work carried on until the sun went down. A couple of young lads regularly turned up eager to help, Amos and Ashley. Ashley lived on the mission as his father was one of the Primary School teachers, Amos, on the other hand, lived up in the mountains and it took him a good hour to walk each way. Amos lived with his extended family as he had lost his parents, he was showing academic talent at school so we decided to support his education further and financially support him at a boarding school, where he would be able to concentrate more on his learning. We had the privilege of meeting his extended family as we were invited to the family home.

 

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