Ethiopia Expedition Recap!!

by Engage Now Staff | Jul 19, 2015 | Clean Water, Education, Ethiopia, Health and Medical Services, Literacy, Micro Credit, Orphan Support

The 2015 expedition to the village of Kaliti Ethiopia was a huge success!!

We were blessed to have 16 people participate in our expedition this year, not including the 450 wonderful children that joined us each day in the village.

Throughout our 10 day trip, we all worked on finishing the Kaliti school by painting and preparing classrooms, building, sanding and painting 80 desks, teaching two daily class sessions of math, English, geography, sanitation, hygiene and art and spending time with the villagers!

Engage Now Africa is becoming very well known in the region because we continue to receive federal and local government recognition for our schools and educational programs. In fact, 20% of all of the schools in this region of Ethiopia have been built by ENA. Due to the recognition, we not only had the 240 children who will be attending the school in Kaliti come for classes, but, children from all of the surrounding villages came too! We had 450 children line up early every morning to attend our classes.

Below are pictures of participants and workers completing the school, painting, sanding, building, preparing classrooms and teaching!

Below are students lining up and ready to learn!

One of our classrooms filled to the brim with eager students!

Due to the large number of children we had to conduct many of our classes outside.

At the end of the 10 days we taught in the village, each of the children made posters and we provided awards and a back to school night experience for them.

One of the highlights was having a local nurse come to the village to teach the mothers and their children about hygiene and sanitation. The nurse worked with mothers and their teenage daughters for two days and taught them about feminine hygiene.

We were able to leave 250 mothers and teenage girls recyclable menstruation kits, which were brought over and made by girls in California and Utah. These kits will allow the girls to remain in school and not have to miss class, which often times will lead to the girls dropping out of school.

Another highlight is seeing how excited the children were when we were able to give them a new t-shirt and backpack filled with school supplies to be used throughout the upcoming school year.

This year we had fantastic cultural exchanges between participants and children in the village! We played soccer, danced, beaded, played catch, painted nails, sang, blew bubbles, played jump rope and any other game we could think of!