Green helmets help in Sierra Leone – WESTFALEN-BLATT Christmas campaign supports non-profit organization: The whole village is helping to build the school – Christmas fundraising campaign 2020

The local workers employed by the Grünhelmen concreting.
Foto: Grünhelme

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Education is the area in which we want to support Grünhelme. We consciously work in very remote parts of the country because otherwise hardly any support is received there. Since the start of our projects in Sierra Leone in 2018, we have built a primary school for more than 400 children and a secondary school for more than 150 children. We are currently working on a second elementary school and a high school. At the latter, young people can do their Abitur. There is no such school anywhere in this rural region.

The schools should create opportunities for future generations: To be able to shape the future differently than to follow the apparently predetermined path of the self-sufficient farmer who can barely support his family. Education is therefore always an opportunity for more self-determination, more opportunities in life.

The high school is being built in Mansadu, where we have also built the secondary school. In Mansadu, the way of life is very traditional. The women do the household chores, help with the harvest and sell the surpluses in the market. The men are busy in the fields, collecting firewood or mending the mud houses. The head of the place and the surrounding villages is the so-called Paramount Chief. This post is a relic from the colonial era. The British used chiefs to secure their rule in the remote areas. Even after independence in 1961, the Paramount Chiefs system was maintained – to this day they are the most important actors in the rural regions: They distribute the land and settle conflicts within the village, for example when the cow of one has trampled on the rice of the other.

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It’s done, the school is finished.
Foto: Grünhelme

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The Paramount Chief responsible for the village of Mansadu is called Seku Fina Kali Marah the Fifth. Chief Seku is our main contact for our school construction project in Mansadu and the driving force. The new school was his idea, which he promoted to the school authorities for a long time.

On my first visit to the village, in the middle of the rainy season, our off-road vehicle got stuck in a mud hole a few kilometers from Mansadu. It was pouring rain and already dawn. The water in the mud hole rose higher and higher and it was hopeless to free the car. So my colleague and I had to sleep in the car that night. The next morning half the village was gathered around the wagon with shovels and picks to dig it up. Even breakfast was brought to us. Then we knew: this is the right place, this community can lend a hand! Because that is what is needed in the joint school building project.

We have employed a local construction team with 15 people who receive the local wages. But smaller jobs are the job of the village community, which they do free of charge. Every morning, the women bring the water we need to mix concrete or mortar from the nearby river to the construction site. The sand is also dug out of the river and brought to the construction site. Natural stones can be found in the forests, they too have to be dragged and smashed in order to produce concrete. All of this is in the hands of the village community, which is coordinated by Chief Seku.

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The women fetch sand for the concrete from the river.
Photo: Tobias Steverding

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Of course, things don’t always run smoothly: sometimes we don’t have water on the construction site in the morning, sometimes there is no sand. We are aware that we are asking a lot from the village community – but that is exactly the idea: when the building is finished, everyone from the village has helped. It’s their school, most of which they built themselves.

The work is not to be equated with that on German construction sites. Most of it is manual work. There is no excavator, no crane, no scaffolding builder. We make the bricks ourselves with specially welded steel molds from a sand-cement mixture. Even the gravel for concreting has to be broken out of the natural stones with sledge hammers and fists. The wood for the roof structure comes from the surrounding forests. Ingenuity is required on our construction site. Problems arise again and again for which solutions have to be found with the modest available means.

And life in the village also demands a lot from spoiled Central Europeans: We live, like everyone else, in a small house without electricity or running water. The toilet is a hole in the floor. When it comes to nutrition, we depend on what is available on the market. We usually eat rice with a sauce made from peanuts or leaves of the cassava root. Of course, all of this is a limitation, but it would feel wrong for us to artificially maintain our high living standards. This could create hierarchies or envy.

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Simon Bethlehem, Grünhelm from Gütersloh.
Photo: Althoff

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Poverty is omnipresent in the everyday life of the villagers in Sierra Leone. Many children can see undernourishment or malnutrition. Even small infections can be life-threatening because there is no medical care. School attendance has only recently been free for every child. But there is a lack of buildings, teaching has to take place in overcrowded rooms or outside. In the rainy season, lessons are often canceled in many places. The building of schools and thus the chance for education is only a small contribution. But we are convinced that the long-term fight against poverty can only succeed with education.

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