Meserani Chini Primary School

In July 2011 a group of 24 students from Acklam Grange School and two trustees of The Meserani Project visited Meserani Chini Primary School, and felt that The Meserani Project should support this school. The school was in a desolate and remote area, it had seven classes but only five classrooms, and two of these were in a quite unacceptable condition.

    We liaised with our advisors from the Meserani region, and the trustees decided that we should pay for the building and equipping of two classrooms. The building work started in September 2011, and was completed in February 2012, and teachers’ text books were provided for all subjects and all age ranges.

    695 text books were provided for the pupils at Meserani Chini School in August 2012 meaning that there are text books for all seven year groups, and for every subject – something unheard of for government schools in this part of Tanzania! Many of these text books were provided by James Small, a former Acklam Grange School pupil.

A more recent project was to refurbish the teachers’ houses at Meserani Chini Primary School. The school has a most impressive Head Teacher, Mr. Prosper Tesha, and the results he achieves for his pupils are extremely commendable. A major problem that he faced however, is the recruitment of teachers, and this is because of the remoteness of the school. It is a half-hour landrover drive from Meserani to the school, but his teachers have to cycle this route each morning and evening, and this is proving to be a deterrent. The teachers’ houses at the school were uninhabitable, and the Head Teacher himself was not able to house his family of four at the school. The situation at the start of 2012 was that he did not have enough teachers to educated the children, and was not able to recruit anyone doe to the remoteness of the school, and the condition of the teachers’ houses. Following consultation with our committee at Meserani in August 2012, we decided to fund the refurbishment of the teachers’ houses so as to attract new teachers to the school, therefore supporting the the head teacher in his recruitment efforts. The refurbishment began in January 2013.

Teacher’s house 2012

Typical window 2012

The head teacher’s bedroom 2012

New windows being installed 2013

External improvements 2013

Interior plastering 2013

Building materials 2013

In September 2013 we delivered water tanks and guttering for all four teachers’ houses, and commissioned a local carpenter to start building four double beds.

In January 2014 the beds and mattresses were loaded up and taken to the school ready for assembling.

In July 2014 four former Acklam Grange pupils visited the school as part of their East Africa 2014 Expedition project, and gave the school a number of educational posters that had been produced by the pupils at Acklam Whin Primary School, Middlesbrough.

In August 2014 we were delighted to learn that the head teacher had been able to appoint six brand new teachers to the school, and at the end of that year, the examination results had improved so much that The Meserani Project were able to select three girls and two boys for sponsorship to secondary school in 2015.