By Lesley Walsh
THE FUTURES of scores of children in rural Africa have been enriched with the opening of a local charity-funded secondary school, thanks to the generosity of a Bangor school community.
Spearheaded by two retiring vice principals, Dr Carolyn Armour and Brian Montgomery, who said goodbye to Glenlola Collegiate School last week, the Ugandan school is the crowning glory of Charlene’s Project, a charity set up in memory of the late Charlene Barr.
Charlene’s family established the charity in her memory after she passed away in 2010 aged just 20 from cystic fibrosis.
She was the sister of Glenlola religious studies teacher, David Barr.
The establishment of the new school tops off a staggering £100,000 raised by Glenlola staff, its pupils and their families since it first partnered with the charity in 2012.
The local school embraced Charlene’s dream of ‘building multiple schools’ in Uganda, the dream that lies at the heart of the charity, after David joined the school staff that year.
The new Ugandan school, in a rural area populated by tribal communities, complements the charity’s list of eight primary schools built by the charity.
Some 400 children attend the new secondary school, while it is likely a couple of thousand younger children have attended the eight primary schools since the school building began.
The ‘big’ school has been named after Charlene and is being locally managed and run by well-trained teachers, based on a system similar to the UK’s, on which schooling in the African country has historically been modelled.
It all began after the Barr family visited Uganda 2008, while Charlene was still a schoolgirl herself. She fell in love with the place and was moved by the number of children she found had long-term illnesses, situations she could relate to.
But after being told she would need a double lung transplant, Charlene had to leave school, during her A-levels but her dreams of helping the children she met in Africa burgeoned.
She said ‘if I can’t go out to the school I want to build a school’ and she started to organise and had raised £70,000 within a year.” “She had so many dreams to build multiple primary schools and most of all a secondary school and when she passed in 2010 we had already started to build the first primary school and over time we built all the primary schools but the secondary school seemed impossible to achieve because of the money involved and so on,” said David.
“But Glenlola from the word go really just took Charlene’s Project to heart in an incredible way, and Carolyn and Brian were absolutely instrumental in that. “Just this year we passed the £100,000 mark which is an incredible amount and a testament to current and past and current pupils and parents,” he said.
He said it’s been so lovely bringing out teams of girls to Uganda to meet the pupils, in 2014, 2016 and 2024, and to ‘see the difference they have made’. “The boys and girls in Uganda wouldn’t otherwise be able to access education in the very rural part where they live in,” he continued.
He added it was especially beneficial for local girls within a culture which doesn’t recognise the value of educating girls as highly as boys. Describing the benefits to the Ugandan children – so many the first in a family to attend school – he said it was equally ‘transformative’ for the local girls who have fundraised and visited the far-flung schools.
He said it was important to install the Ugandan communities’ ‘buy-in’ to the education initiatives, to fulfil the aim of the schools becoming fully self- sustaining.
“It’s all evolved to the point that it will be self-sustaining and locally run by community leadership and we didn’t want to come in and say ‘here’s what we think’; we wanted to give them ownership.
“If we weren’t there they can do it themselves and they have done a lot of capacity building for training the teachers and board of governors. “But we will always support and contribute,” he said.
