During the country's extensive lockdown, the Holy Trinity School in Nigeria developed an elaborate drop-off and delivery system for their children and their families. This involved parents collecting the children's classwork and homework at the beginning of the week and dropping back the various finished versions at the end of week for marking. This way, teachers managed to work around the issue of internet access and their inability to hold online lessons for this reason and ensured that children stayed on top of their work successfully, whilst minimising interpersonal contact.
Pandemic: one more issue for Africa
Find out how the Holy Trinity School has got on so far this year
The first half of 2021 has been a lot easier for our schools than last year. Thanks to comprehensive COVID-19 prevention measures, such as regular hand washing, social distancing, and classroom disinfection, our schools have been able to open for the third semester of the academic year. This has been a huge achievement, considering the situation which the world found itself in this time last year, with neither hope nor prospect of opening educational establishments/school in September 2020. Thanks to the tireless efforts on the part of the schools' staff and directors, they have managed to get children back into the classroom, keep COVID-19 at bay and ensure that the children keep on top of the curriculum set out for them this academic year.
For the first half of 2021, the CFF children were able to be back in the classroom, though, of course, on the basis that they washed their hands regularly during the day, teachers disinfected hands, desks and chairs between lessons and the children ate at home before or after coming to school. Whilst moving around in the school building, masks were required and physical contact had to be avoided.
Nigeria has seen a troubled history during the course of the 20th century, characterised even to this day by violence, poverty, hardship and unstable food sources. The pandemic has added another stone to the weight of the burden which the country carries. Despite all of this, the Holy Trinity School staff have managed to get their pupils back into the classroom and the children have excelled this term, kept up with the curriculum and enjoyed seeing their friends again, even if at a safe distance.
We hope that the new school term will see children sitting in their classrooms at school without masks and able to continue playing with their friends in the playground and eating hot meals at school/getting to the bus to school with their friends. However, in order to make this happen, we need just a little bit of help with a few things to get the semester off to the right start:
- Textbooks
- Uniforms
- School buses
With just these small things, we can make the back to school season for our children run smoothly, meaning little heads are more likely to be sitting in classrooms with the right equipment needed.
