RRHS students raise enough money to build a school in Sierra Leone

By Ken Johnston
Editor

When the idea was first pitched to them, a group of students headed up by Deidre Wilson thought raising enough money to build a school in Sierra Leone would be difficult.
Teacher Laura Armistead approached a group of students in November of 2006. “She said it was a good cause.” They called a meeting and the rest is history, as they reached their goal and then surpassed it this past month. They called themselves the Brick by Brick Committee.
“Our goal was to raise $12,000 and we actually topped $13,000. The support at the school and in the community has been amazing,” said Wilson last Wednesday. They plan to use the extra money raised to continue an ongoing sponsorship of the school.
“More supplies, more resources, med kits and hot lunches are what we are thinking,” said committee member Alexis Sharp.
“With the size of the community, we thought it would be very difficult to raise this amount of money in such a short period of time. But we were pleasantly surprised how well it was received,” said Wilson. Their first event, a school wake-a-thon raised $4,000. They then built on that strong support hosting many events in the school, placed coin boxes in stores and wrote letters to area groups asking for support. The boxes raised about $1,000 and the local churches helped out immensely.
The final event that put them over the top was the annual date slotted to be a 30 Hour Famine. However, Student Council offered that date to Brick by Brick to raise money and they did, bringing in over $2,000.
The school they are building will be called The Rainy River School and the students are anxious to see photos of it once it is up and running. The Craig Kielburger Free the Children Foundation was started by a group of 12 year olds, one of which is Craig Kielburger, dreaming about saving the world. This is who Brick by Brick enlisted to build the school in Sierra Leone.
To date they have build more than 500 schools world wide.
With the completion of the Rainy River School, the members of Brick by Brick found themselves looking at the world much differently than they did before undertaking the project. “It is so rewarding to affect people we have never met,” said Wilson.
And the committee is now focusing on doing that again, but this time not in some far away country, but in our own back yard.
They learned of a school, or lack there of, in Attawapiskat First Nation located near James Bay. Few have heard that there is no usable permanent school there.
“A colleague told me there was a diesel spill at their school and the building had to be condemned.” said Armistead. Since that time portable classrooms were brought in as a temporary solution. “They were told by the government that they would build them a new school within a year. Then they were told they would have to wait eight years and now are being told it will be another eight years.”
Wilson said that she and the other committee members were flabbergasted that such a situation could exist in Canada. “Sixteen years is too long for people to be without a school. That is longer than most school careers.”
Since most agencies that help third world countries with schools focus on those areas, the RRHS Brick by Brick discovered there is little they could do financially to resolve the situation. So they decided to go political.
They showed the student body a presentation on the situation there and had them all sign a petition saying, “We believe that eight years is too long for the Attawapiskat children to wait to have a school built and believe the government should begin this process immediately.” Just about every student in the school signed it.
The committee plans to present it to the Board of Education and to write letters to local politicians to get the story on the radar.
While they have never met or even communicated with anyone from Attawapiskat, Brick by Brick feels something has to be done to help. And who knows maybe another group, like Kielburger’s, will be born here, to deal with poor communities in need of schools, resource materials for them, etc.