By Violet Li
Students at St Francis De Sales Primary School, Lynbrook have engaged with a Solar Buddy program to help families in need around the world with energy provision.
The program has been run by the Social Justice Action Team with supervisor Shehani Rukunayake, in collaboration with the charity organisation SolarBuddy.
Students involved in the program are Dante Pizzimento, Jonathan Sequerah, Harrison Reed, Kiara Cabula, and Livinia John.
Dante introduced the program, saying that the team sold melty beads, hot chocolate, and marshmallows to make up the money for the lights.
“We raised over $900 for the last two months,” he said.
“We bought the lights, assembled them, and wrote our letters to the kids that we are giving them to in India, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu so they can study at night because they might not have power.”
Harrison added the team would pack the assembled lights and the supervisor would take them to the organisation where the kits would be sent to different countries.
The team said they had spent a few lessons learning how to assemble the lights and they usually spent around one hour on Monday each week to do the works.
Jonathan said it was pretty easy to assemble the light once you got the hang of it.
Students said they formed this team in a goodwill to help people in need.
Kiara said she wanted to help the people or children who did not have access to the things they needed.
“I wanted to help them and so they can focus on their education,” she said.
The team has completed their action with other actions already in mind.
Livinia said they were changing their actions next semester.
“We are moving on to a new action, which has something to do with bottles,” she said.
“We’re going to be putting all the bottles in a place and then, you’ll get 10 cent for each bottle.
“With all the money we get, we’re going to send it to charity.”
Supervisor Ms Rukunayake said she was so proud of all the efforts that the students had made to raise awareness and support the global community.
“The students absolutely enjoyed being part of the Solar Buddy program, especially being able to assemble the solar light and make a meaningful impact to support families around the world who are currently living in energy poverty,” she said.
“It was great to see the students working collaboratively to support families around the world who are living in poverty.”
The team assembled 25 lights under joint efforts.
