D I P L O M AT I C A| NOTES FROM THE FIELD
School teacher leaves education legacy in Madagascar By Warren Everson
W
hen Kathy Lucking was visiting a village in central Madagascar, it was the children she noticed the most. “They would be there in the morning, just sitting under the trees. Sometimes you could see flies crawling on them — they didn’t even bother to brush them off. At the end of the day, they’d still be sitting there.” A Canadian teacher, Lucking soon learned the youngsters had no access to schooling. “The children had no chance in life without some kind of education, so I decided to build a new school.” It was an improbable plan. Lucking, a mother of four, lived in Eastern Ontario. Finding funds for a school on the other 28
side of the world, in a country many Canadians have never heard of, might be difficult. Nonetheless, she began. Through the fall of 2006, Lucking established a charity based in Cornwall, Ont., and found enthusiastic volunteers to staff it, all of them fundraising to finance the construction. Not long after she got back to Canada, she sent a message: She had the money, the locals could start baking the bricks to make the school. A Montreal-based foundation, “Tenaquip,” later became a major funding source for what Lucking dubbed the Madagascar School Project (MSP); in its honour, the school is called “Sekoy Tenaquip.”
In the autumn of 2007, she watched proudly as the first 65 students filed into the school. Since then, the Madagascar School Project volunteers have learned a critical reality: a school doesn’t sit apart in a place as poor as this. Much of its work now targets community issues that affect the students. The first reality is food. The children Lucking saw sitting all day weren’t lazy, they were malnourished. Madagascar is ninth on the World Bank’s list of the planet’s poorest nations. As one cannot effectively teach a child who is starving, the MSP feeds every student lunch and eventually also began a breakfast program for those who were SPRING 2021 | APR-MAY-JUN
MADAGASCAR SCHOOL PROJECT
A grant from CFLI (Canadian Funds for Local Initiatives) allowed Madagascar School Project to purchase computers and run seminars, opening the world of technology to these senior students.
