Security Concerns and an Oasis of Love

Greetings from Koro,

The year 2017 has passed and 2018 is quickly consuming before I came to you with an overview of our activities.

Together during 2017 we were able to:

• Build  three classrooms and three restrooms on the 3rd floor and one office on the 4th floor, making this building far the tallest in the town and everyone of us proud of it, specially the students and their parents.

I remember the testimony of the local director of urbanism when he said: “This building is a reference to the whole city in terms of building material quality and work quality. There are very few buildings in Mopti region with this standard.”
This building has been our advocate to convince the government to proceed to a definitive concession of about one hectare from the school domain area.
On top of this relatively gigantesque building and good progress toward the accession of a hectare of land for the high school, we were able to:

• Get land with the vital help of one student’s parent for the kindergarten- and build 3 kindergarten classrooms.
• A hand dug well in the kindergarten yard for seasonal water while permanent water is available at the machine-dug well with electrical water pump.
• 4 restrooms for the kindergarten students.
• Good academic and spiritual education for 307 students and through them positively influencing hundreds of families ,
• Healthy students with basic health and care education empowered by the visit of Dr Brandon Pomeroy and Kay Johnson,RN bolstering Abel the local nurse  in January 2017

   
We praise the Lord for the empowering and safe trip of Dr Brandon POMEROY to Koro in early January this year. It was a great timing.

This first week of February was a bit harder and difficult with the death of our 9th grade student Issa GUINDO. Issa was one our most polite and hard working student. He arrived at Grace in October and was so caring for all and loved by all the students and teachers.  After one month he was sick, a recidivate case of mental disease before passing away. It was a great shock to all of us.  We visited his parents who live about 30mn from Koro, with a large number of students and teachers. It was a very sad event.    

This first came up again with the Official Restriction from the CEMG (Chef d’Etat Major Général des Armées ) to not drive any kind of motorbike or truck in Koro because of security issues. It is clearly said that the soldiers will treat anyone disobeying these restrictions as a military target.

I personally don’t think those extreme measures are a solution to our security problem, but we have to obey the restrictions. We have the best solution- Education -with love to all, without discrimination.

On the other hand, the hard situation makes our dream bigger and more clear-cut.  Giving us the vision of extension in three ways- Higher, larger, and multiple growth is possible if you accompany us in this ministry. 

We say big thanks to you for all what you have done to support this ministry we are involved in.

​Thank you, God bless you, renew you during this Year 2018.
Your friend
Ibrahima.