Pageant News

The Azores and Back ocean yacht race has been run every four years since 1975. This year's race leaves Falmouth on Saturday 2 June 2007 for Ponta Delgada in the Azores, and the return leg leaves there on 19 June.
One entrant is Bandit, an Ericson 39, with skipper Mike Martin and crewed by Fraser Currie. They have named Pageant as their chosen charity, and will have our name prominently displayed on the side of their boat.
The crew of Bandit and their friends have already started to collect sponsorship donations for Pageant, and all money collected will be used to provide desk units at Campama school in The Gambia. See more details on this web page, where you can also make an on-line donation.

A Pageant member has built two villas in Bijilo on the coastal strip of The Gambia.
Each villa has three bedrooms, a bathroom, a large reception room, a fitted kitchen with fridge and gas cooker, a downstairs toilet and shower room, an integral garage and a paved garden with a swimming pool.
Both are equipped with solar panels and generator for electricity, and have a piped water supply. The plot sizes are: 42m x 13m and 35m x 13m.
They are offered for sale at £70,000 each, and 10% of any profit will be donated to school improvement programmes on the North Bank.
(see more pictures and contact details)

Team Shap Ahoy, Tim Lovatt and Nick Capron, raised £4572 for Pageant by taking part in the 2006 Plymouth-Banjul Challenge, driving from Cumbria to Banjul in a a 1996 Toyota Starlet. This Challenge has now become very popular and vastly over-subscribed, so this year the organisers added the Bamako Run, ending up in the capital of Mali. Shap Ahoy took part in a preliminary expedition to reconnoitre this new route, known as the T4 Challenge. Their car this time was a 1994 Ford Escort Estate. Their route took them across the Channel, through France and Spain, crossing to Tangier, through Morocco and Western Sahara to Nouakchott in Mauritania. Here they headed east to cross into Mali, and visited both Timbuktu and Bamako. Though this was not a fund-raising exercise, they nevertheless donated £250 to Pageant funds. Read their trip dairy.

Pageant is now helping another school in Banjul, The Gambia. This is Campama Lower Basic School (equivalent to a UK primary school). This school is in urgent need of essential maintenance of buildings, and lacks satisfactory classroom equipment. Pageant has already got the non-functioning toilets fixed. The next urgent requirement is for classroom furniture. At present many pupils are having to sit on planks resting on concrete blocks. Pageant has organised a local carpenter to build desk units, each seating three pupils (shown in this photo). It will cost about £3000 to fully equip the school with these. If you can help by making a donation, please click this link for the full story and more pictures, and then go to the bottom of that page for details of how to donate.

In February, Pageant members visited Kings Kid Academy and KMJ Nursery in The Gambia. They took rolls of brown paper, paints, sponges, brushes, scissors, colouring pens and pencils. They helped the KKA children create a jungle with a wonderful collection of jungle animals, and at KMJ the children created an ocean, with lots of fabulous sea creatures. The photo shows the KKA children working on their jungle. Both of the works of art were subsequently displayed on the classroom walls at the two schools. Ansumana, the headteacher of KMJ, said he was five years old for the day, and got involved with painting and glueing as well. See more pictures and read the full story