The school has deep roots in Kireka, a slum east of Kampala where families found a new home in the 1980s during the war in the north of the country.
Rose Busingye, a Ugandan nurse, founded Meeting Point International in Kireka: a center in the heart of the slum, where women in need, many affected by HIV and AIDS felt loved and found the medical care they needed.
The women, armed with courage and hope, after the path taken with Rose ask her to build a school for their children, a school different from those where their kids already studied, a place where the boys can feel welcomed and taken seriously, and where they could do the same experience that their mothers had first lived at Meeting Point.
“I didn’t want a school, I dreamed of a hospital. But they convinced me: we need to train future doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers…
It was an exciting challenge and so we started!” says Rose.
The first step was to build the kindergarten in 2004 – a simple kindergarten that soon expanded and turned into a wonderful primary school that welcome more than 400 children every day.
But Rose and the women didn’t stop there: they wanted a secondary school!
Not having the financial resources to build a secondary school but with impeccable determination they made 48,000 necklaces and with the help of friends overseas and 1,300 AVSI Foundation volunteers they sold them, soon they reached the amount necessary to start the construction site.
This is how the Luigi Giussani secondary school was inaugurated on February 3, 2012, such a beautiful school was difficult to imagine!
Then 400 students began the academic year, today 500 students attend classes in a serene environment where education is experienced as a discovery of oneself and his/her own value.
