Project Week Starkenburg-Gymnasium Heppenheim
July 10, 2023 • 351 words • 2 minutes
David Schellhaas
Through one of our members, we as an association have had contact with the Starkenburg-Gymnasium Heppenheim (SGH) since this year. Together with the teachers of SGH and Endarofta Secondary School, our goal is to establish a partnership between the two schools. As a first step, we supported a group from the association during SGH’s project week on the topic of school partnership with Tanzania. The aim of the project was to gather ideas to establish a partnership between SGH and Endarofta Secondary School, which will also be supported financially in the future, for example through donations.Eighteen students worked on and learned a lot about country-specific conditions with our support. They dealt, among other things, with the Tanzanian school system and created initial messages and videos for Tanzanian students, alongside a logo for the partnership. The highlight of the week was certainly the joint cooking and sale of specialties at SGH’s school festival. The dishes cooked and sold included samosas (filled pastries), maandazi (a type of fat-based pastry), and vitumbua (small rice pancakes).Many interested visitors were able to learn about the first goal of the newly formed partnership – supporting the establishment of a sickroom at the Tanzanian school, which has been run by the S.C.I.M. Brothers since 2008. Support for such projects is very important, as often the financial resources cannot be raised independently to fund the implementation of projects.All project participants, as well as we as NGO, were very pleased that thanks to a very generous donation from the parents of Starkenburg-Gymnasium, specifically from the Gath family of Automobile Gath in Heppenheim, the first project can be implemented quickly. Both, we as NGO and the Starkenburg-Gymnasium sincerely thank them once again for this assistance!In the new school year, the project group will focus more on exchanges with Tanzanian students. At SGH, they are planning a Endarofta Day to introduce the school and the country across all grades. Even without a physical visit to Tanzania, this helps students gain a tangible understanding of another culture and emphasizes the importance of exchanges and supporting others across many borders.