Monrovia – The Cummings Africa Foundation (CAF) has donated US$3,000 to the James Kin Freeman Memorial Elementary, Junior and Senior High School on the S.K.D. Boulevard in Congo Town as it dedicates an elementary building.
The school was eighth of 35 schools that had a one hundred percent success in the 2016 West African Examination Council (WAEC) exams.
All three of its candidates made a pass.
The school has just completed its elementary building, with the CAF invited to perform the dedication of the annex.
This is just the beginning,” Mrs. Cummings, who is the acting Chairperson of the CAF board of directors, said.
“We encourage excellence, and what I see this morning at this school is excellence,” she said.
She pledged the CAF’s continued relationship with the school, and that the Foundation’s invitation to the dedicatory ceremony was an opportunity to support students who were striving excellence.
“That is just the beginning. We’re going to continue supporting education. That is our focus. Our passion for education is not just talk. We don’t talk.”
“We do. We believe in our deep-rooted system ‘To whom much is given much is expected’. We have been truly blessed.”
“It is incumbent upon us because God blessed us and we must bless others,” Mrs. Cummings added with staffers of CAF, including Country Director Fatu Gbedema, in attendance.
The dedicatory ceremony on Wednesday was indeed colorful. Selections were made as well as a drama promoting balanced diet was performed.
Thrilled by what she witnessed, Mrs. Cummings urged students of the school to keep their eyes on their lessons.
Education is one of three interest areas of CAF — agriculture and health the others. In November 2016, the Foundation donated yearbooks to the Nimba County Community College of its first graduation ceremony that cost US$10,000.
That same month it, in collaboration with the Liberia Coca Cola Bottling Company (LCCBC), turned over a US$30 computer laboratory to the University of Liberia.
Both initiatives were the latest of several undertaken by the Foundation even long before its founding in 2015.
“There are many doors out there in the world that need to be opened,” she told students, who interrupted intermittently interrupted her five-minute remarks.
“The only key that will open that door for you is education. So I will encourage you to continue your education,” she added before cutting the ribbon to the new elementary annex of the school.
The school’s principal, Rev. Derrick A. Buitendyke expressed gratitude to CAF for its gesture and said the school was pleased to have the Foundation at its back.
Cheerful students sang the chorus of the school ode: “James Kin Freeman Memorial School. May the Lord bless us we pray; we will shine as a light and a dove to purify the world. Father, bless the footprints we leave. Bless James Kin Freeman School we pray.”