By Barry Hoffner | Founder and Executive Director, Caravan to Class
Dear Tourari supporters:
We have been experiencing unseasonably hot weather in Northern California lately so much so that the weather almost reminds me of the day-after-day temperatures above of 100 in Timbuktu.
It has almost been one year since you so generously supported the operations for the Tourari school during 2014-15. Your important support helped us fund the payment of teachers, books/school supplies and basic nutrition. Tourari continues to be one of the most committed villages to education in our network. We have our highest attendance rates of the nine villages where we support education, with attendance rates above 85%.
The security situation, despite a number of government initiatives including the peace accords, remains challenging. While Timbuktu itself has remained relatively safe and the villages where we work have not encountered any violence, there have been a number of incidents including the killing of some UN Peacekeepers over the past few months. We can only hope that the security situation will improve and that peace will, once again, come to Timbuktu.
Nonetheless, Caravan to Class is moving forward with our work in both building news schools and supporting existing schools. We finished the Samdiar school just a few months ago and are already building a new school in the village of Kakondji which I visited in April. Kakondji is a scale village with almost 200 children who have never known any formal schooling. We started the Kakondji school construction in August and will likely be finished around the end of the year. We are also renovating the Togha school, which like Tourari was mud-brick and had seriously deteriorated over the past year.
Finally, we are a finalist for a large grant that, should we be selected, will fund a Female Adult Literacy and Empowerment program for 200 women in 8 villages, including Tourari. We believe this will be an important program to raise the awareness of importance of education with the mothers in the villages where we work.
Thank you again for your past support. As we move into late Fall, we will be launching a campaign to fund the current new schools under construction.
Sincerely,
Barry Hoffner
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