…Well not actually doing the building work obviously. I have trouble putting shelves up these days, but we are funding another school in Cameroon in partnership with the charity Building Schools For Africa. If you read my blog a lot you might know that we already built a school in Cameroon a while back. Here is the last blog post about it. Its pretty transformational when you look at what the school looked like before (basically a shack) and how awesome it looks afterwards.
Our reason for doing this remains the same. Education is a good thing, and there are still too many people in the world who don’t have access to it. Education helps lift people out of poverty, and is a pre-condition for a modern democracy. I was lucky enough to be born in England, not into any money whatsoever (far from it), but nevertheless in a country where I would always be housed, and have food, clean water, education and safety. I understand why people give to local charities, or charities that are working on problems they have personally experienced or are deeply connected to, but personally I find it unusually easy to detach myself from considerations such as ‘people like me’ and ‘my country’ and think more about ‘who needs help’ and ‘whats the most impact my donation can make’. I don’t know of any charity in the south west of the UK that could affect as many peoples lives with such dramatic effect as building an entire school in Cameroon would, for the same money. It also doesn’t bother me that I probably will never see the school, or meet anyone who goes to it. I’m unusual like that, so I’m in a good position to do this.
The school in question is called (rather unfortunately for an atheist like me…) ‘St Therese of the child Jesus catholic primary school’ and looks like this:
The last school we built ended up looking like this:
Bit of an improvement methinks. Obviously they just demolish the old one and start again. Project details:
“The project is just the three classrooms, an office, a latrine with hand washing facilities, 27 benches to seat 54-81 children (depending on their age and size!) and 3 tables and chairs for the teachers, tools and seeds for the school garden, project management and monitoring costs. ”
Lets not gloss over the latrine and hand-washing facilities too quickly. Hopefully this will mean better educated AND healthier kids. The total cost to positech is £23,967 (approximately $33,000). The school is in Muyuka in Cameroon, population 34,000.
Like last time, I offer the disclaimer that although these blog posts can read a bit ‘ooh aren’t we wonderful’, I do them mainly to provide information and encourage others to get involved too, and I know thats happened at least once. Positech Games is a bizarrely successful games company, and I feel very lucky to be in a position where we can do stuff like this. Big thanks to everyone who has continued to buy our games and make this sort of thing possible. You rock.