EducAid Community Working Together: Lloyd Igunbor & Carolyne Beckett

Lloyd Igunbor – one of Miriam’s past students from Salesian College, Battersea – has spent the past couple of months organising and packing a container full of donations destined for Freetown. He has been travelling around the country picking up donated items from collection centres – usually friends and family of the charity – in preparation for the final shipping date in December. As you can imagine, this is no small feat, so he has asked Miriam to spread the word to help drive some high quality donations to ensure that the container is full of things the schools really need.

Whilst working in one of the Ebola testing labs in Sierra Leone last year, Carolyne Beckett met Miriam through one of Miriam’s old schools friends, Julia Yelloly, who was on the same team. She visited two of EducAid’s sites, and was introduced to some of our wonderful students. Upon her return, Carolyne felt compelled to assist EducAid in any way she could. Earlier this month, Carolyne started to organise a fundraising drive on Facebook to help fill up the container. Based in Bristol, Carolyne has asked all of her friends and family to donate what they can from the area, which will then be transported down to Lloyd’s collection centre in West London.

Here is Carolyne’s facebook post:

As this shows, EducAid relies heavily on the generosity of our donors. Our students are always extraordinarily happy to receive new clothing. Many of you will know that we do not make our students wear uniforms, but we do insist that their clothes are clean and in decent repair – we are at school at the end of the day!! – so these donations really do help our students in this matter.

If you are able to contribute anything to this wonderful fundraising effort from two of our community, you can contact Farah here and she will send you in the right direction. For those living close to Bristol you should coordinate with Carolyne, and for those living in the London area you should coordinate with Lloyd. Just for the sake of clarity, here is the list of essential items:

• Second-hand clothes and shoes (esp. flip flops/crocs) ages 3-adult.
• Boys and girls underwear
• Black shoes (a requirement to take exams) ages 11-adult.
• Books - non Euro-centric (i.e. not full of skateboards and microwaves etc) e.g. fantasy/factual/thought-provoking
• Educational resources esp. children's encyclopaedias, dictionaries, 
• thesauruses
• Blank CDs and DVDs (for recording lessons for remote teaching)
• Old laptops (2010+ software please)
• Old microscopes and other resources for teaching at secondary level
• Sharable hardwearing toys e.g. Balls (deflated) and treats

As if organising this donation drive wasn’t enough, Carolyne is also doing a fun run in November then to prepare for the Filthy Girl Mud Run. If you are able to sponsor her directly for her run, you can do so from this link.

Carolyne sums up her post like this:

"Any money or gifts donated will go directly into helping the children. EducAid is a corruption-free zone whose trustees cover any administrative costs.
Come on Facebook let's make a difference!!"

Thank you very much both Carolyne and Lloyd for your amazing work in bringing this together. Without the committed efforts from the EducAid community we would not be half as strong as we are!

If you have not watched our new video, you can do so on the homepage of our website or on facebook. Please do share this post and the video to help spread our message.


EducAid – Learning for Life in Sierra Leone