Hope out of Tragedy

In her latest despatch, Theresa Haine describes how charitable funding has brought life-saving support to a village in Madagascar

Ambohidava is one of five villages situated on one side of a natural flood plain in a remote area of the central highlands of Madagascar. There is a primary school in the village but the only secondary school was in a town six miles away on the other side of the valley.

The older children used to lose three months of schooling every year due to floods in the rainy season. Three children drowned in 2012 just trying to get to school .

The Charity Money for Madagascar funded the building of a new secondary school in Ambohidava.

The road to the five villages is almost impassable even months after the rains have finished and transporting the materials for building a school posed quite a challenge!

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world and, although schooling is notionally free, the state will only pay for one or two teachers so if the parents want their children to learn in classes with fewer that about 80 pupils per class they will have to find the money to pay the extra teachers themselves. For poor rural families this is a very heavy burden and finding the funds to build a new school was out of the question until MfM came along.

We also funded training for the Ambohidava teachers in environmental education. One direct result of this was that they and their pupils have started a school vegetable garden and hope to use their own vegetables in school dinners when the parents can afford to build a school canteen. They have also planted a hedge around their school playground.

The future is now much brighter for children in that area.