Ubunye

Aerial view of the new garden "C + M"

"Ubunye" - meaning 'the Power of Unity' - represents the link between Chaucer Business & Enterprise College in Sheffield and Mboniselo School in the Motherwell Township close to Port Elizabeth in South Africa.

Following a visit by a group of girls from Chaucer to Port Elizabeth with Face Africa in 2009, the seed was sown for a long-term partnership between Chaucer (and its wider community of Parsons Cross in Sheffield) and the cluster of primary schools in Port Elizabeth - managed by Face Africa's local community-partner the Calabash Trust.

A first expedition was planned for February 2011, and when the link was launched to the school a number of interested students and staff got involved. They worked tirelessly for 18 months to raise enough money to fund the project and expedition to South Africa. In so doing, they spread the concept of the link more broadly in their own community – bringing in feeder primary schools and Sheffield Hallam University as well as the local Methodist Church and even Sheffield Wednesday Football Club.

Meanwhile in South Africa, we worked with Calabash to pinpoint an appropriate link school for Chaucer and Mboniselo in Motherwell came to the fore. Head teacher Themba Hopa identified two issues within the school that needed addressing: pupil nutrition and parental involvement. The project concept that was born was the creation of a vegetable garden in the school grounds, combined with water harvesting from the extensive roofs of the school buildings to irrigate it. The idea was to create an initial garden for the school, with plenty of room to expand. This would allow the school to grow their own vegetables. At the same time to encourage parents to come and create a small allotment for themselves to grow food for their own family, thereby also bringing them into the school grounds.

On the 19^th February 2011, 16 students and 5 adults embarked on a life changing experience. Tim’s “Leader Report” below will give you more details of the trip itself, but following a great deal of hard work and lots of fun the project was completed and we celebrated together, Parsons Cross and Motherwell, the real “Power of Unity”.

A selection of photos is show below. For a full selection (or to add your own), visit our Flickr site.