The Byseee Project

Catholic Women Speak (CWS) is raising funds to support Byseee Preparatory School for Girls and Day Care Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We currently send £300 per month, which allows the school to run a feeding scheme as well as providing regular support for teachers' salaries, school uniforms and supplies and maintenance. Our funds have helped to dig a well which is providing fresh water for the school and the local community. The feeding scheme is our latest project, providing regular meals for under-nourished children, who often arrive at school hungry. We'd very much like to increase our monthly contribution to £400 which would allow them to offer the children two meals a week.

The school, which comes under the auspices of St Peter the Rock Parish in Calaba town in Freetown, is run by Yema (Gertrude) Jusufu and her sister Edita Fofana, who are both members of CWS. When asked to explain the puzzling spelling of the name "Byseee", Yema wrote that their late mother was asked to start a girls' school by parents in the community. She had six children - three girls and three boys - and she used the initials of each of her children to name the school:

Bernadette - Yema - Sydney - Edward - Elis - Edita = Byseee

Byseee school offers a wide range of educational and care facilities to women and children, particularly orphans, girls from broken homes, and single mothers. It follows the formal school curriculum but extends this to develop the children holistically and spiritually. The aim is to help them to recover a sense of personal dignity and self-esteem after the traumas of war and amidst the ongoing challenges of poverty, violence and abuse.

The holistic education and support offered by Byseee School, which is rooted in the Catholic tradition but informed by the particular challenges of gender-based inequality and violence against women and girls, expresses the ideals and visions of our global Catholic Women Speak network. While we are not a fund-raising or charitable enterprise, we seek to express our commitment to the promotion of the full human dignity of women and girls by offering practical support to Yema and Edita.

Thanks to a generous donation from Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, London, we have recently been able to provide computers to the school so that the older girls can gain essential IT skills before going on to high school.

Here is a short video we made of the children, staff and parents in the school: Byseee School and Community Project