Collège du Léman Expedition in Tanzania

Just before the Ski Week holiday, a group of 33 of our Grade 8/4ème and Grade 9/3ème students and four staff (Ms. Berthon, Ms. Tawfik, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Ross) went to Tanzania for Nord Anglia's Global Campus Expedition.

The purpose of the expedition was to take part in a variety of community projects designed to assist local communities. This included: providing a goat and building a goat shed for families in extreme need; buying and installing solar lights for families without any means of artificial illumination; building four classrooms for a primary school that is over-subscribed and under-resourced and constructing school desks for the children of that school. The students also met and played with Tanzanian children at a local children's education centre called Seeway, www.swtz.org.

We also had the opportunity to see the results of our labour from last year's expedition, which was to build accommodation for teachers and their families close to another community's primary school. The accommodation is finished and inhabited, with the result that lessons could run during prolonged heavy rains and on Saturdays. This provides primary school students with more lesson time in which to pass examinations that will open up secondary schooling options for them and so directly affects their life chances.

It was a memorable, formative experience for the students and it provided them with a sense of their own power to change the world for the better.