A heart-felt appeal from Niall Dorey to Friends, Family, and BeeHive School Supporters - BeeHive School needs your help now more than ever:

Greetings to everyone, Happy New Year and lots of love to all of you and your families!

Please forgive the audacious nature of this email...

As some of you may know, Beehive School was closed in November by the Ministry of Education, the only reason being the temporary classrooms. We were also given approval to start building the permanent site the same day we were closed!

www.beehiveschool.com/beehive_news_2009_lores.pdf

With the help of lawyers we are still open, but the future is a bit shaky. The good thing about all this is that we are really under pressure to develop and we have made an excellent start. Foundations for two blocks of four classrooms each have been dug and laid, and one block is already up to window level (in just over a month!)

Unfortunately we have no money left.

This email is an appeal to all of you who know us and/or have any dealings with the school at all. If you are able to assist in any way at all, however small, your help would be so greatly appreciated at this time.

Also if any of you are able to pass on the nature of this email to your friends or relatives, it would spread the message wider. Obviously financial assistance would be most helpful at this stage, but any help at all would be great - even advice on who I could contact, or how I could go about sourcing funding of this nature.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email. If you are unable to help at all I completely understand, I hope you forgive me for making this appeal.

Love ,

Niall, Constance, Chimwemwe, Alinafe and Tirumbe

Mzuzu, Jan 2010

[Click here to donate today.]

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Constance and I are keeping all receipts that we are given, and are recording all payments that we make (most do not have receipts!). If you would like a classroom that you have helped build named after you, or your grandmother, or your dog (!) I'm sure we could do that. The main thing for us is that we are able to build a good school.

If I could just give you an idea of the costs of certain things which are so vital to the building at this stage (I am still waiting for an up to date quotation for the entire building cost):

1 pound = 246.22 kwacha 1$ = 149.86 kwacha

1 bag of cement = about 10 pounds (2450 kwacha)

3000 bricks = about 28 pounds (MK7000)

Truck hire per load of bricks = 30 pounds (MK7500)

1 metal window frame = 33 pounds (MK8000)

1 door = 57 pounds (14000MK)

Truck load of sand incl transport = 77 pounds (MK19000)

 

A Note from Maureen Dorey, Niall's Mother.

Niall is too humble to reveal how much personal risk he is taking on in a desperate effort to keep BeeHive School open. But, fortunately, we are friends with Maureen and Stephen Dorey and they opened up to us the other day and described exactly how much Niall has put into trying to keep the school open. If the school closes, not only will Mzuzu, Malawi lose a great school, but Niall will be in financial ruin. I chose to post this excerpt here, not so much to garner sympathy for Niall as to illustrate just how committed Niall is to the school and to explain that when Niall says he has run out of money, it means that he has emptied his savings account, cracked open his piggy bank, and has borrowed from his family, and he really has no other option but to ask you an me for help. Now one is more personally invested or committed to keeping BeeHive alive than Niall Dorey. And that fact truly inspires confidence in me because when a director is willing to go all out to protect the school - you know he has what it takes to run an incredible school.

"He [Niall] has lost almost 100 pupils (together with their fees). He is literally operating on a shoestring, using his and our personal savings to keep the school going for the sake of those parents who have had faith in his ability to weather this particular storm, not to mention his extremely loyal members of staff, who all have to be paid out of Niall's own pocket. While we were there over Christmas we personally funded the purchase of most of the bricks and cement he has so far used in the new building. He still does not know, and won't know for some time to come, if he has done the right thing by starting to build, particularly when the whole future of Beehive school is uncertain. He now finds himself in a Catch-22 situation .... if he is forced to close the school, he will lose all of his income and will therefore have to stop building. If he stops building, he will probably not be able/allowed to sell the plot with an incomplete building on it. If Beehive is allowed to close, the northern territory of Malawi will lose the only international school it has. All the members of Niall's staff, including non-teaching staff, will lose their jobs. I could go on ad infinitum but I realise I'm preaching to the converted! Best wishes, Maureen (Dorey)"