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 7th graders into junior high.
- Provide a new uniform for 7th graders and 10th 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!
Work is underway and on a tight schedule, as the annual rains started in May. Here’s the step by step process.
With no mechanized equipment to clear the land, it must be burned. 
Little goes to waste in Bumpeh Chiefdom. 
A partnership between Ann Arbor Rotary and the Freetown Rotary Club in Sierra Leone will oversee the project’s progress.
I have two visual barometers for the Salone economy. Freetown’s beaches were empty. No tourists, which adds to unemployment. People can’t afford to go to their own gorgeous beaches. 
This mother of twelve shows us it’s never too late to learn your ABCs for the first time, and how to “carry over” when adding three digit numbers.
For Bumpeh Academy, one of the Chiefdom’s newer schools, progress happens in small steps. Very small steps. Senior high classes, previously run “second shift” in a primary school, moved to the main school addition, still in progress as funds are available. In 2015, a concrete slab was poured for three classrooms. In 2016, a zinc roof and partial walls between rooms were added, and classes started. I was happy to hear from Vice Principal Koroma, above, SFSL funded part of the addition with the school fee scholarships we paid for girls. They used the money to buy bags of concrete. Still, children at Bumpeh Academy are in school learning. 98% of Academy students taking the 2016 senior high entrance exam passed! And they have a new Peace Corps teacher, Ethan Davies, above, right corner. 
In full swing, CCET’s fruit tree nursery grows a variety of trees from seed: orange, grapefruit, lime, avocado, guava, cashew, mango. Three workers plant seeds collected from local fruit, and water and nurse them for a year+ until ready to plant in the Village Orchard program. Some go to newborn parents, restoring the tradition of “baby trees.” Some will be sold for income to continue to operate the nursery. Abdul learned to write and make signs in Adult Literacy class.
Bumpeh Chiefdom is a prime coconut growing area. Pa Willie personally raises coconut seedlings in a closed pen behind his house to keep out thieves. The coconut, husk, shell and all, is embedded in soil until it sprouts. It’s a longer-term venture taking two years, but they’re worth more. Pa Willie’s tree-growing skills date back to working in a Liberian rubber plantation before the war.
Sherbro Foundation Executive Director and P&G Alumna Arlene Golembiewski, left with Sulaiman Timbo, submitted the proposal. S
High school students like Zainab, left, get practical 
Adults develop 
The Center itself is a new 
Mr. Bendu, a primary school head-teacher, came into the new printing service at the Center for Community Empowerment & Transformation (CCET) to get some UN Children’s Feeding Program forms printed. He walked out of the new Community Computer Center 20 minutes later with his copies.
CCET’s new printing service in Rotifunk is scoring a home run for their customers and for themselves.
Only four months earlier, to get anything printed Mr. Bendu faced an all-day or an overnight trip to the capital, crammed into a minivan bus or on the back of a motorcycle taxi on treacherous roads. His transportation costs alone would have been 10 to 20 times the cost of the printing. The time wasted is just accepted, a common inefficiency holding back developing countries like Sierra Leone.
These three grant makers were happy to invest in projects giving this rural community services they never had before, knowing income goes to support nonprofit programs.
Sulaiman Timbo, left, and below left, is printing service and IT manager
Cell phones are now a way of life, and this means daily charging in a rural town with no electricity.
The CCET Center rents meeting and workshop space for NGO and government programs during the day, when no classes are in session. It’s the only place in town and for miles around with a facility to hold professional meetings for 20 to 100 people.
Next on the list to introduce is a small canteen for cold drinks, snacks and catered meals. The room next to the main hall, left, is ready.
There’s also a growing need for internet service. People may not own their own computer, but they want to be connected to the world around them by email and Facebook.
Some like Alima Kanu, left, JSS II (8th grade), are the oldest and first child in their family to go to secondary school. She comes from a small village where her parents are rice farmers. Her scholarship to Bumpeh Academy made the difference in her continuing in secondary school.
With her scholarship, Isatu Kargbo, left, completed JSS III (9th grade) and got the highest result of 127 students taking the senior high entrance exam.
Sherbro Foundation supports five Bumpeh Chiefdom secondary schools of all faiths with scholarships. I met with the 50 girls at Ahmadiyya Islamic Secondary School receiving scholarships this academic year.
She went on to talk about the challenges the girls face in going to school. There are 208 villages in the chiefdom and only five secondary schools. Many girls must walk 4 or 5 miles or more each way to reach one of schools, often making them late for class. And the tropical sun is hot walking home on an empty stomach to get their one meal of the day.
Kadiatu, left, told me most girls have no lights at home and have difficulty studying at night. By the time they get home and do chores, it’s dark. At the equator, it’s dark by 7 p.m. year-round.
Rice farmers are often forced to take a loan from a local lender at interest rates of 50% and more to send their children to school. These informal village lenders can charge this much because villagers usually have no other option for a loan.
Fula Musa was one of eight women in the project from this small village of 25 houses.
Give for Good
Seedlings are tended and watered for one to two years, then given to villages to plant community orchards and to parents of newborns to raise for income for their child’s education.
Here’s how an orchard gets started:
They position the nursery next to a swamp for a ready supply of soil and water. Nurseries are built inexpensively. They’re bamboo pergolas, made from bamboo felled in nearby forests. Palm fronds laid over the top shelter young seedlings from the hot, dry season sun.
Orchard sites are usually 10 acres and hand cleared by machete, but not burned. The cut brush is laid down as an organic mulch.
Villages will earn money faster as fast-growing fruits and bushes shelter the slower growing fruit tree seedlings from the hot equatorial sun. Cassava bushes, left, shelter a two-year old mango, above.
The economical high-volume, low-energy copier was met with cheers at the Rotifunk facility. With good reason – it’s the only printing service within several hours drive. Printing once meant a trip to the capital Freetown.
Now, the computing center — built from a war ruin — is being used to instruct students and adults on computer use. It also hosts adult literacy classes for the many whose educations were cut short by the war. The solar-powered building is available to rent, the only modern building for miles suitable for meetings and community events of 20 – 100. Primary school teacher training, above, was the first rental customer.
The large duplicator was purchased with a $3,750 grant Sherbro Foundation received from the Ann Arbor (MI) Rotary Club and its District Rotary group. We purchased and shipped the duplicator to our Sierra Leone partner, the Center for Community Empowerment & Transformation (CCET), which operates the Center.
Customers soon lined up for the unique service, which spares them an eight hour round-trip to the capital, Freetown. Many are teachers from Bumpeh’s five secondary and 40 primary schools, who need to print reading materials (students have few textbooks), exam papers and report cards.
Sherbro Foundation 