Parents Meetings

Before every school year starts I hold parents meetings with all the parents/guardians and students to go over any issues and let them know of any changes to the sponsorship programme.

Soon after I arrived back in Sierra Leone after a wonderful few weeks in Portsmouth with my lovely husband I scheduled a parents meeting. I was very disappointed that an hour after the start time only one parent and seven students had shown up out of the 70 or so I was expecting. Sometimes the seeming lack of interest of the families and students can be disheartening.

I can't start the work of enrolling the students for the new school year until we've held a parent's meeting, so all the work I had planned for the week after the failed meeting had to be put on hold.

Parents meeting, take 2 🎬 was a lot more successful than the first try!! Almost all the students were represented by a parent, guardian, or family member, and most arrived early!!
At the start of the meeting there were a few people I'd never seen before who must've seen people gathering and decided to join in, we politely explained that they couldn't stay for the meeting!!
We kicked off the meeting with Muslim and Christian prayer and then jumped straight in to go over the issues, review the code of conduct and make appointments for the individual meetings I have to have with every student.

We talked about how the parents need to be involved in their children's education, about the behaviour problems of some of the students.......and how with me being a foreigner I'm not going to wait until 7pm for a 3pm meeting!!!

The meeting went well - so well I couldn't get people to leave after the meeting had ended!!

One student did turn up 3 hours late and was politely (as politely as I could manage) asked to make an appointment for another day!

Dangers of Facebook

We sometimes run sessions with our kids in Sierra Leone about the dangers of Facebook, I can never be sure if they take the advice or just think I'm being am old fuss pot.

Imagine my shock when I logged into Facebook and some naked pictures of someone I know showed up on my timeline......but they weren't photos of one of the kids.......these were photos of an adult you'd expect to know better!!!! We'll call him Mr X.

He had send nudie photos to someone he thought was a pretty young French lady, turns out it was man hiding behind the profile and he was now threatening to ruin Mr X unless he paid them $2,000.

I have no idea how Mr X dealt with it, the photos were removed and the French lady's profile is no longer there.

How embarrassing though, I'm embarrassed and to be honest a bit disgusted that I saw the photos.
I would imagine that Mr X is embarrassed as quite a lot of his friends had commented on the photos before they were removed.
I wonder if Mr X's wife saw the photos or is aware of them (oh yes, Mr X is a married man who you'd have thought would have no business sending photos of his privates to young ladies!!).
Even worse, what if his kids saw them??

This is a perfect example though of why people need to be careful who they make friends with on Facebook and not to believe that everyone is who they say they are.

One thing is for sure, I'm not looking forward to seeing Mr X again in a hurry now that I've seen so much more of him than I'd ever have wanted to!!!!