Our Lesotho Project

Two weeks ago we started an exciting project called Project Lesotho. Lesotho is a small, landlocked country in South Africa.  Being surrounded by South Africa, their main economy is based on the exportation of diamonds and water sold to these countries. Despite this exportation, the country still suffers from poverty, and it is causing bad living conditions. The poverty combined with AIDS has caused the median age to be 22,9 years. Lesotho has the third highest HIV prevalence in the world!

In April 2011, a teacher at a primary school from Lesotho visited an International English class. She told them about the school she teaches at, and the situation they are in. The school is called Mamoeketsi primary school, and it has around 800 pupils. Their classrooms are really small, so in order to move around, the students have to walk on the desks. They now have 5 computers, but no Internet. This is where we want to help!

To show their gratitude to last years International English class, the students at Mamoketsi primary school sent letters. Our class sat together in a large circle, where we read all of them. It was touching, inspiring and very motivating! After reading the letters, we split our class up in different groups. I'm in a group that is in charge of marketing. How do we draw attention to our project? We made a group on Facebook, and we now have 39 "likes" on the page. You can like us here! We also made a twitter-account, make sure that you follow us!  We will be posting the latest news and updates on how we are doing with our project! 

Last Tuesday all the groups made buns and brewed coffee that we sold at different places. While some groups sold at our school or in Oslo, my group decided to meet up at the train station in Sandvika, 07:15. Unfortunately, students from another school were already there selling exactly the same as us! Despite this, we still earned 600 kroner. Everything helps I guess.

The most exciting part about this project is that we've recieved funding from Akershus Fylkeskommune, and 3 students will be able to go Lesotho in March 2012!!