New Boarding house near Topas Riverside Lodge completed
We recently had the pleasure of attending the handing over ceremony of the new boarding house to Nam Sai Primary Boarding School. This is the latest school project managed by Topas in the Sapa area.
Read on to learn more.
Nam Sai Boarding Primary School is just 7km from Topas Riverside Lodge, in Sapa. The area is home to the Tay, Xa Pho, and Red Dao ethnic minority groups.
The school has 186 pupils. Before we worked with the school, 75 of them shared a small boarding house which was a very tight space for so many pupils.
Following an inspection of the school, at Topas we decided to allocate funding from our charity partner, The Frederiksborg Gymnasium school in Denmark.
The project was then managed by our experienced project manager, Mr Kien Tran.
After nearly 6 months of construction including a bad rainy season, the new boarding house was finally completed on August 15th – just in time for the new school year opening day on September 5th.
The boarding house now has two sleeping rooms of 36m2 each; one teacher sleeping room of 15m2; and 1 store room of 9m2. We also added a pupil shower room of 6m2 with heated water. We added another extra donation of 8 bunk beds with mattress, blankets and mosquito nets, chair and table. The total donated was 438,833,000 VND.
At the handing over ceremony we welcomed our charity partner with 3 teachers and 14 students from Frederiksborg Gymnasium School to Sapa for a visit and to attend the official boarding house handover ceremony with presence of local government and leader of Sapa Education Department and our CEO, Mr. Lasse Olsson.
At the ceremony, Mr. Phạm Kim Luận, the School Principal, said:
“To support the ethnic pupils in the remote mountain area is always a priority. Topas has done great work to help building the extra boarding house that is very important for Nam Sai primary school.
The better conditions will very much encourage the pupils to come to school with happiness and for sure they will have higher studying results. The pupils’ parents will be happy to bring their kids to school. All teachers will be more happy to see their pupils are happy.”
Mr. Nguyễn Trường Chinh – Director of Sapa Education Department said:
“Last few years Topas have been working together with Sapa Education Department to do many great charity projects to support many schools in the Sapa region to have better study conditions for pupils.
“On behalf of the Sapa Education Department I would like to say thanks to Topas and all Topas’ charity partners for what they have been contributing. We still have many schools that need to be renovated. We hope together with Topas we will step by step make those become better and better.”