Ghanaian charity found grateful for pupils’ gener

A former Stirling GP has thanked pupils of St Margaret’s Primary in Cowie for supporting her charity work to transform the lives of young girls in Ghana.

Dr Mary Higgins was delighted to receive an invitation from the P6 class at St Margaret’s to accept a cheque for £420 on behalf of her charity Let Us Shine.

The children had raised the money themselves prior to Christmas, thanks to the generosity of the school community and their families.

The funds will be used to buy text books and other school essentials for the Let Us Shine Girls’ Academy in Kpandai, Ghana.

Mary spent 20 years as a GP with Allan Park Practice but has devoted much of her retirement fundraising and supporting the African school.

Let Us Shine is a Scottish charity founded by Fiona Mawuena, a young pharmacist from East Kilbride who had worked with Mary’s son, Paul, a paediatrician, who became a trustee with the charity.

Founded in 2007 in Kpandai, one of the most impoverished areas of Northern Ghana, the boarding school was for girls who would not otherwise have had access to formal education.

It started with two classrooms, 60 pupils, two teachers, a house mother and a manager.

Now there are more than 200 girls in the school and it has scored in the top five per cent for Ghana in national exams.

A classroom at the school is dedicated to Mary’s late husband John, a retired paediatrician, who worked at Stirling and Falkirk hospitals, and who died in October 2008. Money raised at his funeral funded the classroom plus a sick bay named ‘Higgins Hut’.

Mary has herself made the trip to Ghana a dozen times but decid 2019 would have to be her getting there not only involv Scotland but also a 13-hou journey from Accra to Kp potholes on red dust roads

She told the Observe “During lockdown when t to close, Let Us Shine prov of food for the families to c food for pregnant women

“When it was possible would visit the outlyin continue some form of ed absence of any online teac

“St Margaret’s Primary sponsored one of the lit school from the day she star to the present day. She will