Written By : Sia Tongu, Iris Guinea Location Leader
*Due to COVID-19 our schools are currently closed. Our students have also been experiencing interrupted education due to political unrest in the nation and now more uncertainty as they also face lockdown orders due to COVID-19 precautions. We hope to open back as soon as we can!
When I arrived in Conakry, Guinea from Sierra Leone in 2012, I started a school to serve the many children who either had no parents, or whose parents could not afford to pay their school fees. The school was very successful, but in 2014 we had to close and send one thousand children home because the deadly Ebola epidemic was engulfing the country. The school remained closed for three years and when we were given permission to open it again. We found it was in a very bad state of disrepair and would cost too much to return it to a place fit to host a thousand students. We were heartbroken.
Day after day I watched as little children, many without parents, were unable to go to school because there was no one to pay their school fees. They played on the streets, some ate food out of rubbish bins, and others slept wherever they could find a place where they felt safe. They were unruly, undisciplined, and there was no sign of things improving unless God answered our prayers to provide us with a school for them.
God gave me the vision
While I was talking to a friend, who was just as worried as I was about the welfare of these children, God gave me the vision to start informal schools in the Iris church buildings not being used during the week. I set about hiring one teacher for each of five schools and gave them the mandate to teach the children whatever they could! They taught writing, mathematics, and reading. I was so happy to know they were learning something and becoming disciplined. When we had the funds, we would provide the children with a meal since many did not have consistent nutrition.
After only a few weeks at school, an excited child who was about 10 years old, came running up to me and showed me she had learned to write her name, something she had been wanting to do since she was a small child. This was such a rewarding moment for me as I realized how her life had been impacted.
New Life
The schools soon changed from informal places for children who had been playing on the streets, to formal schools where the children could follow official school syllabuses, and at the end of the first school year, over 700 children passed to graduate to the next class! We now have these children in their second year at school, and more children started in their first class this year. It is rewarding to see how many have accepted the gift of education we have offered them!
The schools are still ill-equipped with many children still sitting on mats on the floor or kneeling on the floor writing in books on the church benches, but still, they prosper, and still, the desire to be educated overcomes the inconvenience of not having desks and chairs. We are also not able to give them lunch as often as we would like to, but we pray, we trust, and we know that God cares for them even more than we do, and He will provide. The number of our schools will grow and well educated young adults, with a solid Christian upbringing, will go forth from our schools one day to make a strong, God-inspired difference in this country!
