By Kenn Scott | President
A very special Holiday Greeting and Merry Christmas from Zanzibar!
This past year has brought with it a lot for us to celebrate. In addition to having our first full year of the school being reopened, we were able to bring over 100 new students into our short course programs. We've also had the opportunity to offer new courses to our students including a much requested English course as well as From Earth to Zanzibar, a course focused on environmental sustainability designed and sponsored by Stars@Zanzibar, an NGO from Holland. Our landlord also painted the interior and exterior of the school in November, giving us what feels like a brand new school. In December, our students built a community garden where the students and community come together to learn and share in the fruits (and veg) of our labors. Many of our students have had success in their small tourism businesses and we continue to work on our plans for expanding our programs at Welcome Ideas. This has all been thanks to your generous support of Welcome Ideas and we truly can’t say thank you enough!
As we continue to expand our IT course offerings we are looking to add at least 2 new courses next year. One course will be focused on our students who have already completed some of our IT classes; this course will help these students master the use of email and provide them with the basic skills to design their own websites. Another course will be a prep course for our other IT programs, teaching students the basics about using computers that will provide them with typing/keyboarding practice so they can be more productive and efficient when they start the Beginning IT Course.
In our last newsletter we discussed the exciting news that the fiber internet had been installed at Welcome Ideas. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until two months after the installation of the fiber cable that the fiber service was up and running. Although this delayed some of our plans for integrating internet training into our classes, we can now happily say that high speed internet is now working at Welcome Ideas (well, “high-speed” for Zanzibar). This next year we will be able to use the internet in all of our classes and especially in the IT courses.
We are so excited for what 2023 will bring. We are hoping to purchase all the remaining computers for the computer classroom this upcoming year so that we can maximize our resources. We’re also hoping to have the funding for a teacher who will be able to teach IT as well as other classes. On behalf of our students, thank you for your continued support of Welcome Ideas. We are so proud of all the things that your support has helped us accomplish and we see great things on the horizon!
Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays,
Kenn
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