Our last field trip of the academic year, was a trip to a primary school in Allada (a town about an hour away from Cotonou). This all started when we (the class of Years 4 and 5) created art work that was sold at our annual school fair in order to raise money for charity.  The money was then used to buy school benches for a primary school in need.

When we arrived at the school to visit, we saw children in brown, ragged uniforms and many of them had no shoes or bags and some had neither. After I saw that a lot of them had neither bags nor shoes, I was so touched that I decided to find a way to help them. My father and I have thought up some more ways to help them:

• Donating old shoes and bags
• Start small fund raisers, for example a lemonade stand
• Buying some toys
• Donating old French books for the younger children
• Buying some school supplies such as chalk for their boards

As you can see in the list, there are many ways to help those poor school children, especially, the younger children growing in that school so that they can have a little more hope that things will get better.

There is one lesson I learned from the trip that you can apply in life: Be grateful for what you have because there are other people who need what we have, but they don’t have.

Sara Vias, Year 5