Alice? Alice? Who the f@*k is Alice?

Alice was a mother to 6 and Aunty to many many more…Following her passing in 2020, from complications related to Alzheimer’s, The Aunty Alice Foundation was established in her memory.

After our mother passed during the Covid lockdown of late 2020, we embarked on a near impossible journey to return Alice to her place of birth in the village of Matamp, Sierra Leone. After 2 Plane rides,1 Ferry journey and a very long and bumpy drive, we finally made it to Matamp where the village had turned out in force to pay their condolences.

As soon as school was out the children came and surrounded Alice’s grave, keen to know more about this woman who commanded so much interest and respect.

They had come from the very school Alice had attended as a young girl, a colonial structure built in 1905.

The following day we visited the Primary school. There we found 6 classes of kids cramped into the 3 small, hot rooms. We were shown a second building for a junior school that had been started but never finished, and the secondary school kids had been squashed into a disused health centre.

After seeing the conditions the children were being educated in, the inspiration and motivation for The Aunty Alice Foundation was formed.

With the help of the adults in the village we set to work completing the junior school, increasing the height of the walls, replacing the roof, adding windows, doors, and ceilings, and plastering and painting inside and out. In September 2023 the junior school finally opened.

Sierra Leone is still rebuilding after the long civil war and rural villages like Matamp continue to be overlooked. The Aunty Alice Foundation wants to change the story. We aim to give the children of Matamp and the surrounding area the opportunity to complete their education giving them the best chance in life. We can’t think of a more appropriate and fitting way to honour our late mother’s legacy.

And now we need your help to build the secondary school for these children once they have got through junior school.

Please donate what you can. The children of Matamp will thank you for it, and so will we.

The Aunty Alice Foundation