Over 40% of the population of Lesotho, live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day. As a result, a large proportion of the adults leave their homes to look for work in South Africa. If they can speak good English they have a greater opportunity to get employment. Unfortunately, in the rural areas of Lesotho English is not even at a basic level; children don’t ever hear it outside of school. Helping to develop their language and literacy skills would have long lasting benefits.

You may have heard of Lesotho, a landlocked country about the size of Wales surrounded by South Africa, because of the work of the UK's Prince Harry together with Lesotho’s Prince Seeiso. They have recognized that extreme poverty is not the only problem for the people of Lesotho they have also been devastated by AIDS/HIV. Many of its children are orphans. The princes have established Sentebale, a charity offering a wide range of support for vulnerable children including education.

Unfortunately that support is not yet available everywhere so there are many villages in rural areas that don’t benefit from the program. In Paleng library and children’s centre, the children are dependent upon the work of Marion Drew and her colleague Khothatso Ranoosi for access to English through reading and interacting with them. They are a remarkable pair, developing literacy programs centred around the little lending library (http://paleng.weebly.com/about.html).

Marion's newsletters to us showing the work she can do with limited resources are inspiring. She wants to offer more particularly in relation to literacy, especially in terms of giving children access to books written in English and Sesotho (the mother tongue). In response, a group of three of us have committed to visiting Paleng in December 2016. We have independently funded our trip and are now in the process of designing a number of sustainable activities that can be used to improve the children’s literacy skills.