SOS Schools: Sheikh Secondary School

The SOS Secondary School opened in 2003 to its first 53 pupils. By 2005 there were 150 pupilsI. t has a capacity for 200 pupils.

Many of the 45 boys and 8 girls who started at the school in 2003 had previously been denied any education by the civil war and the interclan fighting that followed it in this war-torn country. Now they were given a new chance, since SOS Children’s Villages rehabilitated a school which had been looted and partially destroyed during the civil war. Teaching staff at the SOS Sheikh Secondary School was employed from both Somaliland and Kenya, although SOS went further afield to find the new principal, Dick Eyeington. Dick and Enid Eyeington, both in their early sixties, have a passion for education in Africa. Dick had been both teacher and headmaster at the world famous Waterford Khamlaba School in Swaziland, a school opened by Michael Stern after the introduction of apartheid laws in South Africa in 1948. Many South African children, black and white, rich and poor, were educated there, including Nelson Mandela’s three daughters