Since 2000 St John’s has supported the Asrahawariat School in Addis Ababa with our Christmas giving programme. (Asrahawariat means Way of the Apostles).
Currently 1.188 boys and 1,370 girls get a free education they would not otherwise receive at the overcrowded government schools. These children all come from impoverished backgrounds. They have been orphaned or abandoned, are victims of war or natural disasters, or come from families that are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty in one of the poorest countries in the world. The head teacher and founder of the school, Asfau Yimeru, was awarded the World’s Prize for Work With Children by the Nobel Prize committee in Sweden in 2001. He runs a thriving community that gives these desperate children a good start to help them rise from abject poverty.
The school is funded by the Asrahawariat School Fund charity. This charity is unique in that all the money donated goes to support the school and none is wasted on administration costs. A board of trustees and dedicated volunteers, led by the Reverend Tim Kinahan, is responsible for the fund.
This year the Fund provided a new multi purpose classroom. Despite this addition the school is only able to accept one third of the children who desperately want to attend, such is the deprivation in the country. Text books are bought from the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and distributed free to students and teachers. They are lovingly cared for to redistribute the next year. The school has a clinic that provides first aid and small scale medical services to all students and staff. More emphasis is now given to preventative medicine, including HIV-AIDS awareness. The school runs a dairy farm that provides milk for malnourished children. This also earns money for the school together with the sale of vegetables grown in school gardens.
Girls especially find it difficult to get meaningful employment and many are unable to resist the blandishments of illegal human traffickers who recruit thousands of girls every year for the flesh pots of Middle East countries. To try to counter this, the school is presenting employment opportunities through appropriate training programmes, such as food preparation and catering. This is seen as a priority.
The annual report shows a school flourishing despite facing enormous difficulties due to the unsettled nature of the Horn of Africa over the last year or so. The Fund continues to support the school which would not be able to survive without the financial aid given.
The charity can be contacted at, and contributions made to: The Asrahawariat School Trust, 2 Woodland Avenue, Helen’s Bay, Co Down, BT19 1TX. A full copy of the report is in the school office.
The fund’s web site is www.asrahawariat.org.uk
Asrahawariat School, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
John Hester