It is the end of academic year 2022, a very warm greetings to you and LAP family in Jesus’ wonderful name from the management and staff of Grace Community Day & Boarding NPS – Minja!
Praise be to God Almighty who has granted us favor throughout this challenging year to run and bring to a close, and many thanks to you and our sponsors for all the support!
Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE)
We had our candidates sit for their final examinations; their papers are now being marked from Kampala. We are hopeful that they will perform well much as their prolonged stay at home as a result of Covid-19 lockdown had a lot of negative impact on them and generally lowering their performance not to be at the level of our previous candidates.
Having secured examination sitting center from UNEB (Uganda National Examinations Board) our children have a lot of comfort doing their examinations as opposed to the past where we used to transport the candidates to other school. LAP has been of such a great help to sponsor these processes which require money.
Other Achievements
All the other classes have also done end of year examinations and gone for almost two month’s holiday as they are expected back in school on February 6, 2023.
We are also very grateful for your donation which enabled us did a major repair on our pump which had developed a lot faults; having taken more than a year without close attention.
The school clinic has remained of great help to the school children and the teaching and non-teaching staff; because of competent health workers that we hire with the help of LAP, very limited referrals to other health facilities are done since most cases are managed from the sick bay. Thank you so much for paying promptly the salaries of our medical staff and for the supply of medicines for treating the children.
Much as we have had major challenges in meeting running costs, paying our teachers’ salaries and buying food stuff for the school as a result of ever increasing prices; we are so grateful to you Mr. President and LAP organization for always coming to our rescue to lessen the burden off us and reducing to minimum; once again, thank you very much.
The cost of petrol has been exceptionally high this year and if it were not because of your donation of a transformer so that the school has electricity, this was going to be impossible! It is not easy for us to forget that major investment you did for the school. However, the electricity power supply is never steady which forces us to use our generator yet the generator has become so costly to maintain because it has lasted for long now.
We were forced to improvise some solar equipment to help light upper classes for evening lessons. Again we used some of the cables and switches you had donated to do the wiring of the solar circuits. These cables were our immediate solutions.
SHORTCOMINGS
Despite the successes, we encountered some challenges which includes but not limited to the followings;
- Too high running costs makes it impossible to pay teachers effectively as we used to manage in the past years and as a result, at the end of every term we are always having salary arrears piling up! This time we had a balance of 5,800,000 UGX of which we are very grateful to you and LAP for having helped us cleared this balance to zero. Thank you very much!
- We have had very unstable prices of consumer goods, including foods, medicines, stationaries, learning materials, uniforms, etc. especially after the deadly pandemic. The whole district was depending on imported food supplies! You would hardly find in the villages, beans, maize, cassava, etc. as we used to do previously; all purchases were from Gulu at very high prices since business men from Gulu were ferrying these items from other districts.
The only solution we had was to contract a supplier who would supply especially the food items and we pay by installment latter. By the time were closing the term, we still had outstanding unpaid balance of 5,200,000 UGX which with your donation Mr. President, this has reduced significantly! To date we have an outstanding balance of 4,000,000 UGX of which we are still crying for help!
- Failure by parents to meet school dues. This used to be a general problem in our community but this time it was extreme!
Conclusion;
We thank God our Father, we thank you Becker our dad with your family and we thank LAP organization with all the sponsors for all the support and providence we have received from you in the course of the year 2022. May the Lord highly grant you peace which surpasses all understanding and bless you with perfect health!
We wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year 2023.