Isatu is a remarkable girl.  She’s an orphan determined to stay in school.  With help from Sherbro Foundation scholarships, she has made it to her senior year!

Each day is a challenge in Bumpeh Chiefdom, Sierra Leone. Isatu lost both her parents as a young girl. She lives with her aunt, a farmer, in their small village of mud houses outside Rotifunk. There’s no public transportation. Isatu and her friends get up before dawn and walk six miles to school.

After school, Isatu walks six miles again home, and then helps her aunt in the field, tending cassava, rice and greens. They grow their own food, but have little left to sell for income for school fees. Darkness comes by 6:30 year-round near the equator. Isatu can’t afford a lamp to study in the evening.

Yet Isatu has big plans. She wants to become a lawyer. She learned in Civics class that lawyers use the law to protect people. “I want to fight for my colleagues and people in the village against violence” and for better conditions, she says.  If Isatu hadn’t received a Sherbro Foundation scholarship, she wouldn’t be in school, and wouldn’t be learning about a world of jobs and careers.

Bumpeh Academy students – Isatu, left, Hellen and Alima

More Bumpeh Chiefdom girls than ever are in school. Nearly 900 girls were enrolled in the area’s five secondary schools at this term’s end.

But hundreds more want to go to school and don’t have $17 to pay the annual fee! Their families are struggling to earn $1 per day to put food on the table. Sierra Leone’s economy went into freefall after Ebola and has not recovered. Families can’t continue to support teenage girls, and many are pushed to marry at 16 and 17. They get pregnant too early. The cycle of poverty continues. Teen pregnancy keeps Sierra Leone’s maternal and infant mortality rates among the world’s highest.

In four years, Sherbro Foundation’s scholarship program has helped 450 girls enter – and stay – in school.

Girls with scholarships work harder in school in order to keep them. They know there’s competition. They now have bigger goals, and pregnancies are reduced to only a few.

Some graduates will go on to vocational training. Some like Isatu are determined to go to college. They want to become the nurses, doctors, teachers, accountants, policewomen and lawyers their country desperately needs. With education, they all can move beyond the cycle of subsistence life that has long trapped their families.

But our scholarships have only helped a third of the girls enrolled. Even more want to go to school.

Now is a crucial time. With the new school year starting soon, you can give more of these girls the gift of attending school. You can:

• Ensure 350 girls have the chance to go to school this year with a $17 scholarship.
• Help girls progress into senior high and bring new 7^th graders into junior high.
• Provide a new uniform for 7^th graders and 10^th graders starting in new schools.

With a strong U.S. dollar, giving is a great bargain. Your $50 will sponsor three junior-high students to make the important leap to secondary school. Or ensure that three older girls can focus on graduation.

$35 will send a girl to school for an entire year AND outfit her with a school uniform. Where else can $35 do as much good as educating a girl?

More good news:  Our Board pledges to match each gift. You’ll help twice as many girls!

It’s easy to donate online: Click here. We welcome checks sent to: Sherbro Foundation, 3723 Sachem Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45226.

Bumpeh Chiefdom’s girls tell us: “We’re ready to learn.”

You’ll open up their world to new possibilities by giving girls a scholarship.

Thank you!

Arlene Golembiewski, Chris Golembiewski, Cheryl Farmer and Steve Papelian

— The Sherbro Foundation Board of Directors

P.S. Isatu and her fellow students are so grateful to you for expanding their world. Won’t you help a few more of her friends? If you do so now, they can be ready for school in September!