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GVN Community Fund - Ghana Refugee Camp Projects
The organisation Children Better Way was started by Semeh Roberts in 1996 while he was still in Liberia. Roberts saw the dire need for an organization to help the mass amounts of children left behind because their parents were killed or had to flee in the first part of the war. Roberts himself had to flee Liberia in 2000 and found himself amidst thousands of other Liberians at the Budumburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, many of whom were orphaned children. This inspired him to start a new chapter of CBW in Ghana for the purpose of empowering the children with informal education, time to play and interact with each other, as well as teach them and their parents or guardians about health issues.
For example, the Children Better Way School is the only educational institute in the camp that doesn�t charge the pupils fees. The children come from the poorest families in the camp; some are being looked after by their grandparents, aunties or friends, because their parents died in the Liberian Civil War. Money is always short and there are no humanitarian hand-outs. The families even have to pay for water. Because the children are often not provided with food or water at home before they come to school, their attention span in class can be severely limited. Children Better Way volunteers want to raise enough money to provide all the children at the school with a nutritious meal and half a litre of clean water in the morning. School principal Peter Jorteh says that �Not only would the children be able to concentrate more if their bellies were full but their parents would be more likely to send them to school every day if they know they were being fed.�
The school is just one of the Children Better Way projects in the camp in dire need of funding. As a non-profit organization located in an underdeveloped country, money is not easy to find. There is an immense gap between the needs of this community and its children, and the help currently available to improve the situation. Any step forward is just that: a helpful and positive step forward. As there is a lot of work to be done, not only does money allow us to find the resources to do that work, but every single penny helps in some sort of way. Even the smallest donations that do not seem to you to be large enough to make a difference are indeed extremely useful. This is one of the situations where a community benefits from any kind of monetary assistance.
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