September 24th

Sankung is busy at the moment (and has been for the last few weeks!) organising all the payments and placements of all our students at their schools and colleges for the 2012/13 school year.

Pakalinding Upper Basic School now has the windows in the computer room repaired where needed, and excercise books were ordered for the schools we support.

We distributed our last newsletter to our sponsors in July, so if anyone reading this would like a copy then please contact me on sjones@friendsofsikunda.org or telephone on 01296 688039.

Sue

Sankung and Oumie's Garden Party!
What a wonderful day we had, the rain kept off, Sankung and Oumie from The Gambia were our guests of honour, and Sankung kept busy making Ataya tea for everyone. So many of you came who have supported our charity for all these years, and it was great for Sankung and Oumie to meet you all. Oumie had helped me make the chicken yassa Gambian style the day before so along with that and the great barbeque cooked up by Mark, with Les toiling away in the kitchen making sure everything was ready in time for our meal at 4pm, it all went well. At the same time we have raised a lot of funds as well, the grand total will be announced on the website in a few days. We will have photographs and a write up in the July newsletter.

We had so much help without which we couldn't have done it, all the trustees and committee members and families, and to name just a few Les and Kate, Richard and Myra, and Daisy my eight yr old granddaughter was a little star running the Treasure Hunt stall and collecting money for us, and I know Aiden Fran's grandson was helping too, thankyou so much to everyone!

Sankung and Oumie's Garden Party

We will very soon be sending out flyers to all our supporters to invite you to our fund raising Garden Party, to take place on May 19th, 2pm till late, at Monks Risborough. Our very special guests of honour are going to be our Charity Project Manager from The Gambia, Sankung Jammeh and his lovely wife Oumie. More details to follow, but we will be having refreshments all day - Barbeque, Gambian dishes to sample, Auction, Live music, Raffle, lots of stalls, bouncy castle, lots going on, but also places to just sit and relax in beautiful surroundings. This is Sankung and Oumie's first visit to England, and we would like to invite you to meet them and help make their trip a lifetime experience to be remembered always! Watch this space! You can if you wish contact me for details.............sjones@friendsofsikunda.org

February 2012 Trip

Anne, Matt, Gloz, Richard and I were in Gambia in February. We had a great time, and also achieved just about all we wanted to do on this trip, which is a miracle in itself! The Busumbala compound now has a roof, and lots of work put in by Matt and Yaya to make sure it was done so well. The ceilings will be put up this week by Yaya and his team. The Sikunda Village School has been painted inside and out, plus all the furniture has had attention to make sure it is all as it should be and the Community and Skills Centre has been given a paint job outside so it looks very smart! All the windows have been completed in Toniataba School and we have provided some dustbins for their clean campaign at the school. We had a meeting with the Gambia Red Cross Secretary General at the headquarters as we work quite closely with the Lower River Division Branch of the Red Cross in trying to help as much as we can. Richard worked at Pakalinding School in the computer lab with Kim a Peace Corp volunteer, in setting up new virus checking and rebuilding pc's where needed, etc., All this was done and so much more, we will be updating the projects section of this website as soon as we can. Our bonus ball is into its next session, we are so pleased to see that continue. We have just given a presentation to the Rotary Club of Bletchley this week, and had a very enjoyable lunch with them, we were presented with a wonderful donation and boxes of supplies for our shipment, we are so very grateful to them for supporting us for so many years. We have many wonderful supporters and thank you all! More updates to come..... Sue

We fly tomorrow!

We are going to Gambia tomorrow morning, 2nd Feb. Matt and Anne will come with me for the first two weeks, then Richard and Gloz will join us for the third week. We have lots to do, including the main focus this time to get the roof on the Busumbala compound plus as much more done to the compound as is possible in the time. Matt will be working with Yaya a builder who lives locally. We will of course be visiting our projects, schools and as many of our students upcountry as time allows. Updates will be put onto this website when we return, and lots of news will be shared with you in our next newsletter in July.

The picture is of one of our deliveries of excercise books in 2011 to a local school.

Sue

Banking......

This is for all of our regular sponsors - just so that you are aware …. We have had problems with our bank, they have decided (without telling us) to close business to all trustee accounts. It was not until after many phone calls and visits to the bank that we found out why we were having problems with online banking and new investors donations. Fortunately, we believe we have not lost any donations and we have been assured that is the case, but we do need to open another account to take over all our accounts. This means of course we will be sending out forms with the new account details which will need signing to enable this to happen. Meanwhile we have it confirmed that the old account will remain open until all transactions can be transferred. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and hope you will understand and return to us the signed forms in the stamped addressed envelopes that we will send to you in due course There are many other charitable accounts that must be having the same issues, and we just hope that we can get this sorted as quickly and seamlessly as possible. We have been told that we are getting some compensation for all the hassle it has caused us, so for that at least we are pleased.

Please be assured that all our monthly donations are being recieved with no problems.

Sue