Marshall, Margibi County – Students of the Alfred D. Peabody Elementary School in Marshall, Margibi County were excited after witnessing the presentation of over 200 chairs to their school on Friday, June 8.
Report by Alpha Daffae Senkpeni, [email protected]
It is the only public school in the city and has been without adequate chairs for the past seven years.
With over 500 students in the school and few broken chairs available, many pupils were constrained to carry their own seats from home, some used broken pieces of blocks as seats, while many others sat on the floor in the class rooms.
Presenting the chairs to the school principal and the city mayor, Marwan Eid, son of prominent Lebanese tycoon Ezzat Eid, said Marshall is his hometown and that his father’s charity foundation will always reach out to the community to help in whatever way.
“We still have other plans for this school; we want to upgrade this school to a high school which will prevent kids from leaving the community to seek high school education elsewhere,” he said.
“What happens is that most children in this area have to go to Monrovia. But being here will help them stay with their parents and avoid getting into trouble. But if you take a ninth grader from here and send him Monrovia, he might get lost.”
The charity is supported by Mr. Eid’s businesses, which consider volunteering and giving back to Liberians as part of its social corporate responsibility.
During the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, the Ezzat Eid Charity Foundation made several donations and contributions to the fight against the deadly virus.
Eid’s firms, which include City Builders, Royal Grand Hotel, Medina Rock, and International Aluminum Factory amongst others, are using the charity as a means of exploring other avenues to expand its social corporate responsibilities in the country.
Alfred McCauley, the school principle, said the new chairs will attract more kids from the community to the school and boost learning outcomes.
“This donation will enhance the growth of our students and help encourage students, who left the school because of the chair problem, to comeback,” McCauley said.
Robert T. Williams, Mayor of the city, thanked the Foundation for “the great gesture” which he said has come the right time to the community.
Williams said the city government had made several appeals to county officials to solve the problem at the school, but he was thankful that the Eid Foundation has solved the problem.
It is the second major gesture coming from the Ezzat Eid Charity Foundation in less than two months.
In late April this year, the foundation conducted a massive cleaning up campaign of the JFK Hospital in Sinkor and made donation of equipment for the regular cleaning of the hospital compound.
Marwan told FrontPage Africa after the donation in Marshall that the foundation is also planning to make contributions to several orphanages across the country.
“So, we are still reviewing how we are going to do renovation project of orphanages in the country. We will try to do one project per month,” he said.