St Peter’s Church in Ruddington is celebrating raising £6000 to allow the completion of a four-classroom block for a school in an impoverished area of Uganda. The target was achieved by a mixture of donations and fundraising events over a ten-month period, culminating in a Beetle Drive event in the church at the end of January 2024 which raised £763.
As RUDDINGTON.info has previously reported, St Peter’s has been supporting the Aminit High School in Teso since 2019, aiming to establish secondary education in an area in which none was available. Students currently have some classes under canvas sheets suspended from the unfinished classroom block (top photo).
Church Member Andrew Third explains: “St Peter’s was put together with Aminit High School by the charity Teso Development Trust that we support as a church. At the time, the school was more a dream than reality, with no classrooms of their own. We first helped them to complete a three-classroom block that the community had not managed to finish, and then we moved forward steadily on building the four-classroom block.”
He continues: “With the amazing fund-raising effort this year, Teso Development Trust will have enough funds to complete the structure and roof of the four-classroom block. Better still, the local government in Uganda have been so impressed with the efforts to build the school, they have lent their support and are currently building a further 4 classrooms.”
Vicar of Ruddington, Rev Andrew Buchanan, says: “There are three primary schools in Aminit but no secondary schools within travelling distance. This means that, in the past, around 300 children each year have finished primary education and then have simply had to return to helping farm their small family homesteads, condemned to a continuing life of poverty. By helping the community to provide secondary education we can break this cycle and give the children the qualifications they need to move into well rewarded occupations, and so change the fortunes of the whole area.”
Rev Buchanan adds: “We have seen God’s blessing on this project in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine. From where we started in 2019 with this community, it was unimaginable that in five years there would have eleven working classrooms at Aminit. It has been a privilege to be involved in a project that breaks the shackles of poverty in a part of the world which suffers indescribable hardship. There is much more still to be done in properly kitting out the classrooms, but what has been achieved so far is way beyond what we could have imagined when we started.”
Ruddington has also been helping the people of Uganda in recent years through the work of The Mustard Seed Project. You can read about some of their many initiatives and projects >>HERE<<.
{Photos courtesy of Andrew Third & St Peter’s Church}
