I am writing in mid November and mid COVID. In any normal year, getting on for a hundred students and staff would be preparing for a visit to the Gambia at the end of next month. We would be fundraising, planning and getting very excited. But, of course, this year, none of that is possible and despite the welcome news of a vaccine, we do not really know when we will be back. What…
Author: stevewlb
Last day in the Gambia 2019
This is the eighth of our traditional fake posts from the Gambia day by day during the trip. They are fake in that I am writing them before we go, but they should give you a sense of what we have been up to each day and will be posted each day at six. If…
Day seven in the Gambia 2019
STOP PRESS – you may have missed a few posts! After not managing to blog all week, today I have excelled myself and created a whole set of live posts from the debate which has just finished after eight hours. What follows is the fake post I wrote before I knew that would be possible. This…
Gambia 2019 Live debate blog- Part Five
Last stages 8hrs later Often what we do at this stage is to try to create a proposal on how to spend the rest of the money and see if people want to agree or disagree with it. The following was agreed after discussion: Wurokang Drugs and food £750 Kolior Money for school £100…
Gambia 2019 Live debate blog- Part Four
Diana Nursery Bakkeba who is the headteacher at Diana made a bid for a PC, laptop, printer and scanner. He said he would be using this for printing exams and filing in paperwork. The students investigating this bid were concerned that there was unlikely to be much need to do exams with nursery children and…
Gambia 2019 Live debate blog- Part Three
How are the students doing? I thought it worth pausing at this moment to pay tribute to the way that the students are working through this debate. Reading through our deliberations here, it may all look plain sailing, but in fact everyone of these short paragraphs hides an enormous amount of discussion and thought- you…
Gambia 2019 Live debate blog- Part Two
The main part of the debate has started with discussion and decisions about three of the villages top priority bids: Jiroff The first bid is for funding the furnishing of the health centre. This project has been really impressive over the last few years and is pretty well finished, but the village now want to…
Gambia 2019 Live debate blog- Part One
We had planned to give you some news this week about our progress on the trip, but as you will have gathered if you have been reading day by day, the visit has been extremely full on with so many wonderful things going on, that we have been had no time to get online. Today…
Day six in the Gambia 2019
This is the sixth of our traditional fake posts from the Gambia day by day during the trip. They are fake in that I am writing them before we go, but they should give you a sense of what we have been up to each day and will be posted each day at six. If…
Day five in the Gambia 2019
This is the fifth of our traditional fake posts from the Gambia day by day during the trip. They are fake in that I am writing them before we go, but they should give you a sense of what we have been up to each day and will be posted each day at six. If…
Day four in the Gambia 2019
This is the fourth of our traditional fake posts from the Gambia day by day during the trip. They are fake in that I am writing them before we go, but they should give you a sense of what we have been up to each day and will be posted each day at six. If…
Beacon in the Gambia 