A wise Ghanaian man once said: "Poverty is like heat. You cannot see it; so to know it, you have to go through it."

In 2010, thanks to a fundraising program sponsored by Afrikids and Deutsche Bank, I had the unique opportunity to visit a small village in the Upper East region of Ghana.  I was welcomed with love and friendship into a community that has, in the sense that you and I are accustomed, almost nothing.  They have no running water, no electricity, and when I first met them, they had no schoolhouse.

On my first visit to this village, called Yale, I helped with the first stage of construction of a structure that was to become the village primary school.  Each day, in the hot African sun, while the children took their lessons under the shade of a tree, the people of the village worked to build walls out of mud.  At night, as the mud dried, we cut doors in the walls with a machete.

With your help, we raised over £1500 on that visit which went to support Afrikids and the valuable work they are doing for children in  Ghana.  But in Yale, there was still work to do.

 In the months after my first visit, with the help of my friends at Afirkids Ghana, we arranged to ship materials to Yale to fortify the structure and provide the children with a schoolhouse that would survive the elements and shelter the students during the rainy seasons.  We shipped lumber, corrugated tin, concrete and paint.  We paid a local mason and roofbuilder to do the work that required a professional.  The people of the village did the rest.

I returned last October to help with construction, and I am happy to report that the schoolhouse is now complete.  Not only that, but thanks to our efforts erecting a primary school, the village elder council has convinced the local government to invest in a secondary school, which will be a proper concrete structure, and to hire teachers to educate the children up to a high school level.

In addition to the money we had already raised for Afrikids, we spent just under £2000 on construction supplies to complete the schoolhouse.  Afrikids was kind enough to front this money so we could buy the supplies and build the school, but as the Yale schoolhouse construction was a not a sponsored Afrikids project, the money spent now needs to be paid back.

I am asking for help to raise an additional 2000 GBP through donations to this page to cover the cost of the construction material.  If you donated before and can afford another small contribution, thank you again and please do what you can.  If this is your first time visiting this page, please give if you can - I assure you it is money well spent.

To learn more about AfriKids, visit their website at http://www.afrikids.org/ or watch this promotional video on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMQ3i-RrS24

Employees of Deutsche Bank, please note that the bank will match your donation 100%, so please dig deep!