The boat to Bubaque island only goes once a week, and leaving time varies from 9am to 2pm, depending on the tides. There is one straight, 13k sand track linking one end (the port) of the island to the other (beautiful beach with a couple of simple hotels and restaurants), an abandoned airstrip, and a (sometimes, relatively) busy port area where women sell the oysters they catch.
One of the most accessible of the 90 Bijagos islands, Bubaque is one of the few where teachers agree to be posted. And it was teachers we’d come to meet, to research repairing a primary school for our next AGB school repair project. With the help of teacher Daniel and school principal Elisabeth, we found the perfect school and we are now planning to repair with the proceeds of the AGB fundraiser 2022. More about Bubaque here on one of the videos made by Martin on our visit:
We packed a huge amount into our 12-days: lots of teaching and training of English teachers from our on-going support work:
An amazing day in Biombo with charity WellFound, researching a joint project to replant mangroves:
And visiting a number of AGB projects:
We spent a few days in Catio in the south, where Bacar has been organising all the well and toilet repairs:
and where AGB (with the help of Patron Capital) completely rebuilt a school in 2021:
We took period pants for women teachers to distribute to girls in their classes as part of our menstrual health project:
We also visited the secondary schools in Bissau: Cuntum Medina and Hafia, where AGB has repaired roofs and run other projects such as building school gardens and rubbish
awareness:
And we also met some of our women university and college scholarship students and were able (thank you Matt and Martin!) to give their first laptops: https://youtu.be/4wD_Iyh7Srk
Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to these projects!