Heroes Secondary School is a private school that was established near a trading center in the Rakai District of southern Uganda. The local population are peasants and traders, since this region is dry and the soil is not conducive to growing crops. The school was established because only one government school was available that could not accommodate the student population of the sub-county. Since its establishment, Heroes Secondary School has become one of the best-performing schools in the Rakai region. There are 512 students under the direction of Head Teacher Ssenkyanja Maurice. There were no boreholes available to the community nor to the students at Heroes. People got their drinking water from lakes and ponds which are 1-3 km away. The water in these ponds and lakes is contaminated because of unobstructed access for livestock. Thus, students were sick and unable to study. Moreover, the distance students had to walk for water was wasting much valuable study time. When we visited the school about a year ago, the water in one of the ponds had dried so it was essentially mostly mud. But, in December 2015, funds were provided for a borehole at this school by the McFadden family of Omaha NE. Now the students at Heroes Secondary School have clean water to drink.

Many thanks to the McFadden family for making this possible!