A CLARECASTLE family has paid tribute to their local community, following their second successful educational mission to the heart of Africa.
Pat and Frances Bergin and their adult children, Tim and student teacher, Laura, have expressed their appreciation to all those in the Clarecastle-Ballyea parish, who supported their month-long trip to Zambia in July.
The Bergin family were accompanied by five student teachers from St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra for their lengthy stint at a school in the Linda compound, outside Lusaka, the capital of land-locked Zambia.
The school was originally founded as a community school in 2003, with the help of Frances Bergin’s sister, Sr Claudia, a Mercy nun, who is now living in Trim, County Meath.
Last year, Laura set up a society in St Patrick’s called ZOCS, Zambian Open Community Schools, and she and three other students, including Ennis trainee teacher, Ultan O’Brien, went to the Zambian school with Laura’s parents to begin the work.
“It was such a success last year that we repeated it this year,” said mum, Frances. “They’re a tremendous group, full of energy. However, we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the Clarecastle and Ballyea community. We had a church gate collection and all the money went towards a food programme.
“The children are hungry at the school so we fed them every day with high-energy protein. It really sustains them for the winter and they survive,” added Frances, who works as a nurse at the daycare centre in Clarecastle.
The student teachers worked in intensive groups with 72 of the weaker children in the school to improve their literacy and math skills. Classes were from 8am until 11.30am and resumed at 1pm until 5.30pm.
Children were chosen who could barely read but had a good grasp of spoken English and, after four weeks, all 72 of the children could read fluently, got a fantastic foundation in maths and were more confident in their own ability to excel in these difficult conditions.
“The students also put on a concert for the Irish ambassador, Finbar O’Brien, and his Zambian wife. We had music and Irish dancing, including The Siege of Ennis, and they taught the Irish national anthem to the children, who also performed the Zambian national anthem,” Frances said.
The school has 1,500 pupils but only 10 classrooms and teachers have to teach in classes with up to 120 students. To make matters worse, half the teachers in the school are untrained community teachers.
The Irish teachers ran an idea-sharing workshop with the local teachers. This was a huge success, with contributions and learning on both sides.
Thoughtful people who knitted and donated woollen squares, Frances said. “It’s winter in Zambia right now. It’s dry and warm during the day but cold at night. The senior citizens knitted them for me and I took them out to vulnerable children. Their little houses are very inadequate and they would be very cold at night.”
Other items brought to Zambia included bottle tops, which were used by the Irish teachers for spelling, counting, addition and multiplication and for games, such as Scrabble, to improve their use of the English language.
The local teachers were also shown their usefulness and these bottletops will be treasured as a valuable teaching resource in the school.
They also collected frames from reading glasses in the school at Clarecastle and an optician friend went out to Zambia to test all the children’s eyesight.
A package of 126 pairs of glasses then arrived at the school, while the volunteers were there.
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By Ron Kirwan
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.