Photo: Derrick is now dreaming of becoming a teacher himself, a dream that is much more possible now that he has clean, safe, renewable light to study by each night. Photo credit: LendwithCare/Peter Caton.
His teacher Ms. Michelo says, ‘He has turned out to be the best reader in the school. He wasn’t like that before. Actually, it’s so amazing, I never thought he would get to where he is now. It’s not just about me motivating him, he also has the motivation within himself. He wants to see himself out of that poverty".
From everyone at SolarAid and our social enterprise SunnyMoney, we want to say a huge thank you to everyone that donated to our appeal. We have raised an incredible £69,677. This means 17,419 solar lights can be distributed to families living without electricity.
In our appeal, we told you about a school dormitory in Tanzania that burned down because a candle was knocked over by a student, a result of students not having clean, safe light to study by. Now we want to tell you about Derrick.
Derrick lives in Nyakantingi, a remote village in Zambia, located miles away from the electricity grid. Because of the severe drought, many families in this village are struggling to put food on the table, and when the sun sets there is nothing left to do but to go to sleep, as the village, in lacking electricity, becomes pitch black. This has made it difficult for the students at Nyakantingi Primary School to study in the evening.
However, recently, a Light Library was introduced at the school. A Light Library works like a library for books, but with solar lights. It allows students to borrow a light to take home in the evening so that they can study at night.
Derrick is one of the student’s that has been borrowing a solar light home with him every night. When his Mum Mervis noticed this, she made his education a priority. She says that when a child is educated, he doesn’t experience as many struggles in life. At 7pm each night, Derrick sits down to study for an hour and a half, and then Mervis is able to use the light to cook. After that, the family has time to sit around and chat before going to bed, hearing about each other’s day. Derrick used to struggle with ‘mirror writing’, writing letters backwards, but that is now a thing of the past.
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