As many of you know, we have been successfully operating the Padri Vjeko VTC (Vocational Training Centre) for 16 years now. After the untimely death of Fra Vjeko in 1998, the school was started in his name. Fra Vjeko had always desired to build a trade school to help the disadvantaged youth of this area to learn a skill to provide for a better future. To honour his memory, we began the VTC school and over the years we have gradually built it up to where we are very proud of how it is operating successfully.

Recently we have begun building another school – a Technical Secondary School – to train and educate students who have managed to complete nine years of education but have no means or possibility to continue their education further. This new school will now help them to do just this. In the school, we have a computer section, which is a compulsory component of the newly approved TVET curriculum approved by the Rwandan Ministry of Education.

With the generous help of the Franziskaner Mission of Dortmund and the German people we built a computer lab in our VTC school, and we now have the task of building a computer lab for our TSS school. To this end, we have gotten in touch with a dealership here in Rwanda and have managed to bargain a good price for reliable HP computer laptops. The cost for these is 226,000 Rwandan francs which, according to the exchange rate in Rwanda, is about 275 Euros or 350 US dollars.

We are making an appeal to anyone willing to help us with this project of raising money for these computers. We would be most grateful to anyone who would like to help us by donating the cost of a computer for our school.

The money can be sent to our bank account.

This is a very good cause as the computer program is absolutely essential to the new curriculum that we are required to implement in our TSS school. We would be happy if any donors would notify us via our contact form and we would respond to let you know that we have received your generous assistance.

Edited by Valerie Kae Ken