On Monday 5th July, Mr Spurgeon and I will once again be driving to Canterbury, Kent, to take many more boxes of old textbooks and reading books to Books2Africa.

As all donations are tracked, I can now provide an update on the books we delivered in September. In October, many of our books arrived at a distribution centre in Jos, Nigeria, and just last week, I received an email to say that the biology books we donated have now been delivered to Health Tutors’ College Mulago, in Kampala, Uganda.

It is so exciting to receive these emails and realise our books will be making a difference.

Just to remind you if you missed it:

Books2Africa is a UK charity that collects and sends donated books to increase the quality of education in Africa. It also extends the life of the books and decreases the number of books that end up in land fill (more than 13 million a year in the UK).

Books2Africa was founded in 2012 by four African students at the University of Kent as a student project – they collected more than 11000 books in their first year and stored them in their student flat and they became a UK registered charity in 2013.

They shipped their first pallet carrying 1067 books to Morocco in February 2014; on 4th May 2019 they shipped their 1 millionth book to Africa.

This small charity deserves recognition for their work and if you are interested in volunteering or donating, then please find more information on their website: books2africa.org.

Miss Clarke

Russian department Zoom call with a Russian Cosmonaut

On Tuesday the 20th of April, the Presdales Russian department were very lucky in being able to offer the Russian pupils a chance to meet Sergei Rysansky on zoom at lunch. A few other schools attended and we got a chance to hear about Sergei’s incredible career as a Russian cosmonaut. He played us a slideshow which documented the amazing adventures he had on his two space flights. My personal favourite moment was when he and his crew held the first pizza party ever in space. He also took over 350,000 pictures and showed us some of them. They were all incredible and really captured the beauty of our planet. But, it wasn’t all fun and games, when one member of his crew became very ill, Sergei had to perform surgery on him and it luckily all went to plan. Sergei told us that was his scariest moment on his trip. There was time at the end for a Q and A, where all the schools got a chance to ask him their questions and he gave fascinating in-depth answers to every one. He told us about the importance of learning languages in school as he had to learn English in order to go on his flight and learning another language opened many opportunities for him. Overall, it was a really interesting and fun to speak to a real cosmonaut and I would like to say a big thank you to Sergei and the Russian department for that fantastic opportunity.

Esme Sabin – Year 9