Sister School

This week we wrote letters to our sister school in the village of Bois d'Avril in Haiti. The grandparents of one of the children in my class live in Haiti and have sponsored the building of a small school in the village where they live. They asked us if we would like to correspond with their students and I leapt at the opportunity!

Bois d'Avril in Haiti - the school is the yellow building

We wrote our first introductory letters back in early November and scanned and sent them via email to the grandparents. Since they have electricity and modern conveniences (they also house the two teachers of the school) they were able to print the letters and take them to the children. We received our replies a couple of weeks later - written in Creole!! Translation was a bit tricky to say the least but we managed to get two letters put into English - my class were thrilled.

Here's one of the letters that the children in Haiti scanned and sent to us.

There are only 33 children in the school in Bois d'Avril and they are in classes K - Grade 3. We thought that they were the same age as our children but when we got the letters we realized that some of the children are 15! This is the first opportunity that they have had to get an education.
Our children are so privileged where we live - and often they don't realize it at all. Corresponding with this little school in Haiti has opened their eyes to the lives of others in a very real way.

We wrote our Christmas letters this week and we wrote them in French. The girls drew the most beautiful pictures they have drawn all year and their writing was wonderful. They wanted to do their best for their pen pals. We've also taken all our photos and put them on small Christmas trees so that our friends in Haiti can put faces to our names :)
We're hoping that this project will grow to become more than exchanging letters. Our dream is to be able to support this little school financially as well - to help provide what the children need to learn.

We'll send our Christmas letters on Monday - and I'll post some photos of them here too.
Does anyone else correspond with schools in different places?