Dispatches

by Fr. Peter Abue

November 2007

Dear friends of CORAfrica,

My travel to the USA this last November was primarily to seek support for the future of CORAfrica's educational programs. A benefit put together by the US CORAfrica team yielded quite good results as a great number of people turned up the night of Saturday, November 10th at the Carriage House Cafe in Ithaca, NY. We were hoping to raise funds for a resource center to encourage and support our programs such as micro-credit building in our location at Ipong-Obudu. Such a resource center is needed as a way to jumpstart our new Community Education Center in that location. Though we were not yet able to raise the much-needed funds for these vital projects, we were at the same token able to raise awareness for our needs and the future of CORAfrica.  

Our benefit drew in about 50 guests with profits totaling close to $3,000. Wine was donated by several local wineries, cheese by McCadam Cheese, coffee by Gimme! Coffee, flowers by Arnold’s Florist, and service wear by Rick’s Rental World. Read more about the event in our press release.

Already, as a fallout of that recent visit, 10 Laptop computers were donated by the Cornell Computer Reuse Association (CCRA) and were safely brought home for use at the St. Joseph Orphanage School in Idum-Mbube. These computers will help us train our staff and students on the use of modern information technology. We are expecting the arrival of yet another consignment of donated computers from CCRA, where we hope to equip our proposed resources center at Ipong-Obudu. This will depend on how soon we secure a means of shipping them to Nigeria. Special thanks goes to Al Heiman of the CCRA at Stimson Hall, Tony Cosgrave of Olin Library and his wife Julienne Cosgrave of Gannet Health Center, and of course Deb Schmidle of Mann Library, all at Cornell University. I understand you all are also making plans to ship not only the remaining computers, but also arrange for books to our St. Joseph's Secondary School Library. We thank you all in Cornell University for generously sharing your resources to enable Ezra Cornell's vision of giving "education to anyone, in any field " come true even for our rural children in Africa.

Rural secondary school Children at the St. Joseph's school in Idum- Mbube with laptops donated by the Cornell Computer center

As an Alumni of Cornell University, now a Parish Priest in a rural village in Nigeria, I have noticed biting problems faced by my parishioners to the extent that parents consistently find it difficult to even afford the means to support their children’s education. I still firmly believe that together we can help in the poverty alleviation war in our programs. Following the workshop conducted on micro-financing this year, our parishioners are anxiously waiting to receive small loans that will enable them to support their businesses and thus raise their economic standards. Our hope is that we can raise enough funds to begin our micro-credit scheme, as we believe this is the best way we can make parishioners self-reliant. In the past, we have noticed that loans as small as 5,000 Naira ($50) could go a long way to change the life of a whole family. If our parishioners could be helped to start their small businesses, they would be able to afford education for their children. We must help them become self-reliant and CORAfrica’s micro-credit program is the one way out. To begin with, we need a resource center and office space to channel all our strategies for training of personnel and micro-banking procedures.

One of the many groups of lenders at Ipong, eagerly awaiting the kickoff of the Micro-credit scheme

Training of local personnel is important as we seek to survive as a community and a parish. Already, experience has shown that faith-based approaches do leverage training in terms of education of our rural children. We are more likely to raise sincere, hardworking and creditable citizens from faith-based initiatives than from conventional training models in Nigeria. A recent workshop was held in our Little Flower Nursery Primary School for the newly appointed teachers between the 9th to the 16th of November on the usefulness of integrating community values in education. In the workshop, a team of facilitators focused on primary school education, with training sessions on the National Policy on Pre-Primary Education, the importance of lesson plan, the use of suitable methods for pre-Nursery and their disadvantages and the importance and implementation of faith-based values in pre-Nursery primary school. Thus, the reason we continue to emphasize the building of a resource center is that it will foster the conduction of such workshops, as well as provide physical infrastructures that will enable us to begin our much talked about Community Education Center in our present location.

New staff members at a recent workshop held at Little Flower Nursery Primary School, Ipong-Obudu

The needs of rural children continue to increase even when our awareness campaigns have not been quite successful at reaching our much-needed targets. Major constraints continue to come on the way of rural children in their efforts to create a better future for themselves and their immediate society. For example, rural children face road hazards that sometimes render them invalid for the rest of their lives as the case of Susan Ikori Udey.  Susan's education has been arrested and there is no hope that she can continue her schooling unless someone intervenes. The case of Adie Ukelina creates more concern for children who sometimes are bedridden for life on account of often curable illnesses. Please take a look at our website and see how you can come to the aid of some of very needy rural children: http://www.corafrica.org/humaninterest.html.

Also read our Recent News items and our Donation page on our website to get a better understanding of our last efforts at fundraising for our programs and how best you can join us to realize our dreams for our children in rural Africa.

Thank you all for you continuous support.

Fr. Peter Obele Abue