Decisions on How to Spend Maseru Rotary Club Grant for 2011

Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 11:31 PM
To: 'Pullanikkatil, Deepak'
Subject: Rotary Club of Maseru grant for Laptops to Lesotho

 

Hi Deepak,

 

Sorry I took so long to get back to you on the Rotary Club grant for Laptops to Lesotho.  Communications with the teachers at the school in Ketane are incredibly slow, and we wanted to include them in this decision.  They have decided that they would like to use the Maseru Rotary Club money to send two teachers/principal to grant writing and fundraising training, probably in South Africa.  We want to get them training in grant writing now, then we will start working with them on submitting actual grant requests, with an eye to them taking over full control of this program in the future, including all the financing. 

 

If that isn't acceptable, or if there is additional money left after that, they would like to use it to hire someone to develop lesson materials for the XOs specific to the Lesotho curriculum.  I'm going to try to work with SchoolNet Lesotho - Camara on this.

 

Unless, the Rotary Club has an objection to these choices, I will get more information on the "where, when, and how much" for these and send you a formal proposal. 

 

Just so you know, we also have feelers out to several Rotary Clubs in the U.S., including ones in Ohio, North Carolina, and Idaho.  The Ohio and North Carolina connections look very promising.

 

Principal Matlabe Teba is in Colorado now on a 3-week professional exchange.  I spent a few days with him there.  He is learning a lot and is very excited about new ideas he hopes to implement back in Lesotho.  As a result of his visit, we also have some new partnerships and funders. 

 

We had a board meeting while he and I were together in Colorado with Andrew Dernovsek, and we've made a couple changes to our overall program.  It's nothing dramatic, except we have decided to delay acquiring internet access for the school because of the technical difficulties and the huge costs that entails. 

 

I will be coming to Lesotho again later this year.  The plan right now is for me to be there in November and December.  We are going to hold another two-week intensive computer training program for the teachers after the end of the school year.

 

The teachers at the school have begun investigating other primary schools in the Ketane area, as the first step in expanding our program.  They have narrowed it down to three schools, and are now focusing on determining the quality of the staff at each.  We hope to select a school later this year, then begin laying the ground work for the expansion, so that we can start bringing computers to the next school by 2012-2013.

 

There's a lot more happening, but I think that covers the most important points for now.  I'll get our formal proposal to you soon.

 

Janissa