School closings in Ontario, Happy event for South African students.

How school closings in Ontario, being a sad occasion, is being turned into a happy event for students in South Africa where the need is very high.

As you may know already, we are in the process of organizing another loading of 2 containers of school supplies coming from schools that have closed in Burgessville, Norwich and Otterville.
The Thames Valley Board of Education is allowing Rotary to empty the schools, taking the supplies that they are not re-using in the new schools.
This far, 8 containers have been loaded and send to South Africa, where local Rotary Clubs are receiving the containers of school supplies and seek out schools that are in high need of desks, chairs, books and other items they don't have.
At many rural schools in South Africa, the students sit on the ground while gathering for class.

So, here we are again getting ready to load more containers.
Following is a tentative schedule.

Thursday April 18 afternoon at 1 o'clock at the Burgessville school, we are hoping to get about 15 volunteers to help out with preparing desks and other items, which will be loaded into the containers on Saturday.
You need to bring an electric or battery operated drill, screwdrivers, pliers and some other tools that may come in handy.
We may divide the group to go to the different schools if needed.

On Friday April 19, we need a tractor trailer, with a 53 foot enclosed van trailer, to go to the Thames Valley Board warehouse in London to pick up 25 skids of books that we use to fill in all nooks and cranny's in the containers, so there is no empty space being shipped to South Africa, and bring the trailer back to the schools for Saturday's loading of the containers.

Saturday April 20, we hope to start loading at the Norwich Public School on 8 Elgin Street West around 8.30 AM. Here we hope to have 25 volunteers to help us load all the materials into the container.

In a meantime, we also may have to send some people to the other schools to go and pick up items for the container in Norwich, as we don't have enough material at each school to park a container.
Between the 3 schools we have 2 containers.

This event is a project of the Rotary Clubs of Oxford County, London and Grand Bend

Please consider helping out with this most worthwhile project, where you can make a difference and reply by email to me.

Thank you,
Peter Stam
Rotary Club of Woodstock-Oxford