Rahula Trust's Partnership With Paleng, Lesotho

From Paleng:

During 2023 and 2024 Paleng was privileged to receive funding once again from Rahula Trust. Their ongoing commitment to supporting us, their trust in our team and our work are very encouraging and important to us.

This funding allowed us to do many important things.

We were able to run four focus groups in different settings across Lesotho with children from 7 years old upwards concerning a traumatic event that occurred in their community. There is no community resource in the form of counselling for children, whose lives are often traumatic.

The outcomes of the focus group discussions clearly indicate:

• That children rely a great deal on one another. In villages, children tend to play in age-mate groups which are tightly knit and very supportive
• That children have very clear ideas as to how they feel about matters in their lives, and are articulate in communicating those feelings

These were some of the children’s responses to a story about the theft of a chicken:

I felt scared that my younger sister could be stolen from my watch/care. It felt so scary. I saw ntate Meharo as a bad person. It made me remember when we were chased after school by a guy who wanted food from us.

And in response to what they feel about friends and friendships:

Good friends listen to one another. Hore ba re thuse ka mosebetsi oa sekolo. (They help us with our school work) They become part of our lives and family.

These focus groups have proved to be invaluable for us.

On the basis of the responses from children, we are shaping our picture storybooks going forward into a small series of books which we are calling ‘Metsoalle E Molemo’ (The Four Friends) to emphasise the agency that children can take in their lives, the importance of friends and collaborative friendships, and messages of optimism and hope.

The Rahula-funded survey of our pilot village-based Reading Clubs is underway. One of the Clubs has been very successful this year, and the other has faced some challenges.

Our survey will help us uncover the reasons behind the performance of both groups, and we are looking forward to deepening that understanding. We are redoubling our efforts to produce more books, and to create and support a culture of reading which will in turn support projects of this nature.

Rahula has funded 3 of our picture storybooks thus far, and it is hard to underestimate the importance of these for our children. We regularly give them out as mine-to-take-home books at our school and village-based Story Festivals.

We are also in the process of developing a manual for teachers to support them in running their own school-based Story Festivals, which will see even more children receiving their own books. In this regard we work with a small group of local teachers from whom we get excellent on-the-ground advice. This is an important step for Paleng in terms of sustainability.

We are immensely grateful to Rahula. They help us support children, teachers and parents who are all trying to grow a culture of reading in a fun, interesting and relevant way, which is at the core of our mission in Lesotho.

Thank you 😊
Children meeting in one of our Reading Clubs. The survey will explore how these children feel about their weekly meeting.