The Scholarship Project


The Pilot Light Foundation is pleased to be supporting, for the second year, scholarships for students at the Haikal Academy, a school for orphans and vulnerable children in Bo, Sierra Leone. These are children from the ages of 3 to 18 years old.  The large numbers of orphans in this country are resulting from the combination of HIV/AIDS and the civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002.  Sierra Leone is an extremely poor nation with tremendous inequality in income distribution. While it possesses substantial mineral, agricultural, and fishery resources, its physical and social infrastructure is not well developed, and serious social disorders continue to hamper economic development. Nearly half of the working-age population engages in subsistence agriculture.

This school is the first one of its kind in Bo, the second largest city in Sierra Leone, as it was established and is maintained by a woman who is herself from Sierra Leone and not a foreign person or group. This woman, Hawa Turay, comes from Bo and was educated at Ohio State University, returning home to  continue the work that was begun by her parents, taking care of orphans. A five hundred dollar scholarship will provide for one student the following: teachers, books, school buses, uniforms, two meals a day, nannies for the pre-schoolers, medication for the 2% of children who are taking anti-retroviral drugs for HIV, and a quality education that is rarely seen in rural areas of Africa. The school has classes in computers, physics, chemistry, debate, to name a few and the students are given lessons in life skills that they will need in the outside world, i.e. eating with fork and knife ( food is eaten with the hands in Africa), using flush toilets, and using computers. They are provided nutritious food, some of which is grown right on the school campus. It may be the only food they have that day, as some of them are living with elderly grandparents that cannot easily work or sometimes are themselves in charge of their younger siblings at home. They drink clean water that is pumped from two wells that are right on the campus. The school currently has 250 students, 55% girls and 45% boys. These students are referred to Ms. Turay by HIV/AIDS counselors at the local hospital when they lose a parent to the disease or a parent may become ill. Haikal Academy makes a commitment to not only educating, but raising the orphans and other vulnerable children that walk through its gate.

Project Budget: 500.00 per scholarship for 250 children

                                                                                                                                                 
      
                       Chemistry Lab                                                                                  


                           English Class

                                Hawa Turay
        

First twenty scholarship recipients