FUNDRAISING proved to be a piece of cake for kind-hearted students as they continue to support a community in Uganda.
Staff and students at St Aidan’s Academy, Darlington, staged a bake sale raising much-needed funds for residents of Kalule, including a family of asylum seekers given a temporary home in Darlington but eventually deported.
The academy also donated a sewing machine that will help ladies make and mend clothes.
For the past five years the school has supported the impoverished people of Uganda under an initiative called Together We Can and with the backing of governor Rev Sheilagh Williamson, priest in charge of St Columba’s and St John’s churches.
In that time they have raised hundreds of pounds, provided water filters, children’s football strips and helped build a technical school and a local oven.
Rev Williamson explained that Elizabeth Kiwunga and her children Marie, now nine, and John, seven, were placed in Darlington by the UK Border Agency and lived with her family until they were eventually removed by the government.
“They became like my family and I promised them I would find them if they were sent back – which I did the following week,” she said.
“I was given permission by the bishop to have a sabbatical in Uganda and I helped set up a project for the ladies which has grown and grown. We also managed to build the family a house and my husband and I pay for the children to be educated. Elizabeth has taken in another two children and we, with the help of others, support them too.
“St Aidan’s has been fantastic. The students have been so generous and are so interested in our work. I’m going to Uganda next week to take the sewing machine and the money raised will help pay for the excess baggage charges.” St Aidan’s Academy principal Nicole Gibbon said: “Our students are the first to
ffer their help when anyone is in need and their generosity is boundless when it comes to raising money for the people of Uganda.”
