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Children line up outside to receive their gifts of
pencils and notebooks from Jan |
June
2008
Hello, my name is Jan
Valkenburg, from Holland, and I volunteered for CERCOPAN in 2005/2006. I
had a really good and educational time at CERCOPAN, and when I left I
felt the need to help CERCOPAN and the people that work there, and more
importantly the children from Iko EsaI village. I went back home
thinking about what I could do.
In 2008 I booked a overland trip through Africa that
started in Spain and ended in Cairo, Egypt; in total we travelled 43,000
km, passing through 25 countries in 10 months. When I booked this trip I
saw that we where going to drive through Nigeria and we were going to
Calabar to get visas for Cameroon ---I saw that this was a perfect
opportunity to do something for the children and the project. At the
time I was working in Holland at Heinz to save money for the expedition,
and started asking friends and family for school materials to take with
me to Nigeria. After a couple of months I already had lots of pens,
pencils, coloring books, crayons and notebooks AND 700 Euros that was
donated by Heinz to CERCOPAN for educational purposes - this was used
for the school outreach programme! Great!
I started the trip on the 22nd
March 2008 and after driving through very hot deserts in Mauritania,
beautiful villages in Mali, amazing countryside all through Ghana. Togo
and Benin we finally crossed the Nigerian border on the 5 of June 2008.
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After driving through Nigeria for 5 days we where informed that the
bridge on the way from Ikom to Calabar had collapsed and that big trucks
like ours would not be able to go over the rather rickety wooden bridge they had built
as a temporary replacement. So we were forced to park our truck in Ikom,
while
some of us continued to Calabar (about 3 hours by road) to get visas for
Cameroon, and another group of 10 came with me to CERCOPAN's Rhoko site by
public transport. The first day we went strait to Rhoko camp where we went
swimming in the river and went to have a look at the mangabeys in the
large forest enclosure; some people also went on a night walk, searching
for wildlife, especially bush babies, with headlamps. The next day we
walked out to Iko Esai (8 km) where Michael (CERCOPAN Education Officer
from Iko Esai) arranged for everything at the school for my arrival with
all the goodies for the children. It was truly an a amazing experience
to see so many happy faces when I distributed the school materials to
the children! Later, I received many nice letters that the older
students wrote to me saying thank you for what I did. It was just a
short visit, and, sadly, the very next I had to go back to Ikom and
continue my expedition through Africa.
I just
want to say thank you for all the people that helped me make it possible
to help these school children. THANKYOU!! |
