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Our first sister school sister school partnership began in the fall of 2003. Hannah Senesh Community Day School is a progressive Jewish day school of approximately 120 students located in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Hannah Senesh has a long-standing commitment to community service and therefore has embraced Positive Planet's Sister School Project as both an opportunity to promote the Jewish values of tzedakah (charity) and Tikun Olam, the imperative to repair the world.
St. Andrew's Matale Hill Primary School is located in Kalisizo in the Rakai District of Uganda. It is a tuition-free Universal Primary Education School with a student body of approximately 900 students more than half of whom are orphans primarily due to the AIDS pandemic.
To date the Hannah Senesh Community and its supporters have raised over $20,000 for Matale Hill Primary School, which has funded the following:
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Construction of over 500 desks and chairs, enough so that for the first time every student has a place to work. |
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Metal doors and windows in the main school building allowing instruction to continue during inclement weather and greatly improving security. |
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The upper grades classrooms were wired for electricity. |
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Major improvements to the foundation of the main classroom building were completed and other structural repairs were begun and will now be completed. |
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Replacement of the asbestos roof with a corrugated iron roof for the main classroom building, which will allow safe harvesting of drinking water, was begun last year and will now be completed. |
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Shipments of donated books, computers, clothing and other educational materials |
After completing major improvements on the school's infrastructure, the Matale Hill Primary School community has decided to begin to tackle the problem of chronic hunger, which affects most of our students to a significant degree. Many children come to school having eaten no breakfast and cannot afford even the small cost of a school provided lunch. In keeping with the objectives of the Positive Planet Sister School Program to create true partnerships that encourage full participation of our sister school communities, we will work together to reach our ultimate goal of a lunch for every one of its students.
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