Greetings from Padri Vjeko Centre to you, our dear readers! As we all know, the COVID 19 pandemic has thrown our lives into quite a turmoil. Padri Vjeko Centre here in Rwanda was no exception. Early in March of this year, the Rwandan Ministry of Education instructed all the schools in the country to close down and we had to send our students back to their home villages. So overnight our school at Padri Vjeko Centre became very quiet! Happily, our students returned to Padri Vjeko Centre on November 2nd and are now busily engaged in their studies once again and enjoying all that we did for them while they were away.

However, while the students were gone, this did not mean that we stopped our work! Not at all! There was much work that could be done at this time when we were not able to teach.

By now, dear readers, I’m sure you know that we have had two locations for Padri Vjeko Centre; one in the village of Kivumu, and one in the nearby the village of Musengo. The Kivumu school was where we first began our project and we have always had our Welding and our Carpentry sections located at this site. Our other sections, as well as our Kindergarten and Primary schools have been located at the Musengo site until now.

Well, this has changed! We have been making some re-arrangement of our sections! You see, we realized that the Kivumu School and its secure compound offered a perfect location for our Kindergarten and Primary school children. And, as we will have more and more Primary grades each year, the site will serve us very well for future expansion.

So after a great deal of hard work over these past months, we managed to renovate the old classrooms at Kivumu, cleaning up, repairing walls, putting in new windows, repainting, constructing a new roof and making more black boards for each room. We also added some brand new classrooms, as well as a library and reading room, store rooms, and even built new toilets! And we’ve purchased a great many new books to help our young students in their studies.

Meanwhile, our little children have been busy learning other new skills! We’ve started a club for table tennis and for chess and I am pleased to report that they are playing these games with great enthusiasm and they are becoming really good!

Up at the Musengo location, we have also been very busy. We managed to finish the dormitory for our boys who are boarding at the school. They had happily moved in by February this year, but due to the Coronavirus pandemic, they had to leave in March, but are now back in their new living quarters once again.

The decision to have the Kindergarten and Primary schools at Kivumu meant that we had to relocate the Welding and Carpentry sections. We decided on an ideal site that was closer to the Musengo School and the Dining Hall, making it much more convenient for the students to have their mid-day meal. As you can imagine, this was an enormous undertaking... moving all the welding and carpentry supplies, equipment and heavy machinery to the new location!!!

But we didn’t stop there! We have also built foundations for water tanks, outfitted with new filters and water pumps so that we will have water up at our school. And we have been cleaning our school’s Kitchen and Dining Hall, doing repairs and repainting the walls, as well as repairing the furniture. We also repaired the tables and chairs in the school’s classrooms, and outside we fixed up the basketball compound where the boarding students enjoy playing after school hours.

We repaired surveillance cameras around the school and installed lightening rods in two locations for the safety and security of everyone. Also, because of the concern for the COVID 19 pandemic for when our school reopens, we have built several hand-washing stations for our staff and students. Overall, we have been doing a lot of general cleaning, tidying and organizing of the school classrooms, as well as buying new printers that we seriously needed.

And finally, dear readers, I am very happy to tell you that we have begun to clear the land for the construction of our long-awaited and much needed Sport Hall. Our students have even been helping in this venture by carrying the cut wood for use in our kitchen stoves. This sport complex will provide a really important venue for our indoor sport competitions, as well as for our celebrations, award ceremonies and assembly meetings.

It is thanks to you, dear readers and generous donors, that we are able to do this work that is so vital for the future of the young generation of Rwandan youth. We could not do this work without your help and we sincerely thank you for the support, encouragement and interest that you have given to us.

By Fra Ivica Perić
Headmaster Padri Vjeko Centre