The Chicken Coup School, a welfare project

Sometimes we wonder where our dollars go that are contributed to the humanitarian fund listed on church donation slips. Many good and great things are done with that money to bless peoples lives. The beautiful thing is that all the money goes to help people. The personnel who administer the funds are all missionaries doing volunteer service. Our friends the Knudsens and the Binghams are some of those missionaries.

In West Africa one of the projects was to help a school in the small village of Kusi. The village of Kusi has no running water or electricity and the dwellings are very basic. ( however not the mud huts seen in many villages during the 3 hour drive from Accra to Kusi)

The only place available for a school in the village of Kusi was a large chicken coup. David Awuku wanted to teach school and a local farmer wanted his children to attend school, so the farmer donated his chicken coup for a school in 2005. The outside of the building is cement and there is a cement floor inside the coup and windows were added to the outside walls and the inside is divided into 6 areas which are used now as classrooms. The rooms are divided by, what else, chicken wire. Therefore, the lessons in one classroom can easily be heard in the others. One section at the back of the school is used as a kitchen with a coal fire pit and a large black pot for cooking lunch for the children. ( you can see the bonku which is like a heavy dumpling made of corn flour and plantains.)

There are 275 students and 14 of them are orphans which live on the premises. You can imagine the noise with all those open classrooms. The teachers each held a switch in their hand and we saw one student get his hand hit with the switch. ( is that why the students are well behaved?) The teachers are inovative. Bottle caps are used to teach math. No calculators here!

LDS Charitites donated the school desks and recently a mill for the community. The community members can bring their corn and beans to the mill and for 20 cents have it milled into flour. The flour is used to make food for their family and food to sell. The earnings from their sales comprise their income. The miller gets one dollar a day and any extra money goes to the school teachers who before were working only for room and board.

The school children noticed that they could see their reflections in the car door of the LDS Charities missionary couple, so they entertained themselves making faces and posing in front of the car. (Girls and Boys look alike - all with shaved heads. The girls can be identified by their pierced ears). Then they discovered if they wiped off the red dirt ( caused by the dirt roads) they could see themselves even better. Many handprints were left on the car along with some names written in the lingering dirt.

Community members expressed their appreciation for the mill and the ability to support their families with the flour milled for them.