After 20 years of waiting, Bongolethu Primary School has something big to celebrate: their BRAND NEW school!  We joined their celebration and together with HA!Man (Francois le Roux) paid them a visit earlier this month and even helped them inaugurate their new music room!

Some things are worth waiting for, and when it comes to a brand new school, the 600 students at Bongolethu Primary School in Phillipi sure had plenty to celebrate when earlier this month they were given the keys to their brand new school.   Bongolethu Primary is situated in Brown’s Farm, Phillipi, an informal and semi-formal settlement south of Lansdowne Road. The community is housed in corrugated iron shacks and government RDP houses and are plagued by poverty, unemployment and crime. Their old barrack-like primary school had no hall, library or proper academic, technical, recreational, arts or support facilities.   The brand new school has all the amenities of a modern school!  It even has a beautiful music school, and a library ready to be filled up with books and someone to run it!

To help them celebrate we visited them with our very talented Francois le Roux and our awesome photographer friend Barbara Cowley who snapped these great photos for us to enjoy.  The atmosphere was joyful, and triumphant as their new music room was inagurated to the rhythm and melody of our HA!Man as he joined the school's choir wonderfully lead by their music director.

For us at Novalis Ubuntu, the celebration is ours too for we  started working with Bongolethu back in 1996 when several of their teachers participated in our "Putting the Heart Back into Teaching", a training programme based on the principles of Waldorf Education.   Bongolethu was also one of the pilot schools which successfully participated in our "Beautiful Schools Programme".

May the school continue to be the beacon that holds the vision of a new world, and a new Ubuntu Community!  May other South African schools follow in their foot steps!

To view all the pictures in this photo album, please visit this link

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=160976&id=46453633360&l=efb0791f17