Kinamba Community Project Update – April 2024
We were thrilled when a brief newsletter arrived with us this week from Meg at the Kinamba Community Project about a visit to the GITISI secondary school where a number of children from the Project are studying.
The school is a secondary boarding school and one of the Kinamba girls is actually the Head Girl, something everyone is understandably very proud of.
Secondary education isn’t always an option for children in Rwanda’s rural communities, yet the GITISI school provides a kind and caring environment with teaching and pastoral staff very willing to accommodate differences and do their best to help individual children.
The school takes Kinamba’s less academic students and is more willing than most to take individual needs into consideration, something we are grateful for as students are usually expected to conform and little or no account is given for any child who might need more help.
The visit allowed children from the Kinamba Community Project to see where their older friends were studying and, as GITISI is a boarding school, find out what it was like to live at the school during term times.
During the visit they enjoyed a friendly tag rugby competition and, along with children from other schools, were able to perform some traditional dancing. In this session, the children also performed different songs in Kinyarwanda and English, and also be part of a drumming party where they accompanied the singing.
The drumming was an opportunity for the secondary students from the Kinamba Community Project to demonstrate their skills; drumming is taught to the primary aged children at Kinamba so it was great to see them still practising their drumming now that they are older.
It was a visit that none of the children wanted to end and all left with very happy memories of their day at the GITISI school.
Meg concludes: “We are fortunate to be supporting these kind and talented people who are working with our students and giving them important experiences not readily accessible to others.”