On Monday 10th June, Hunter Hall in Penrith welcomed over 220 children to the school, who took part in the ‘Ankoma Dream Schools Choir’ to record a CD for the Ankoma Outreach project.
Ankoma Outreach supports a small, rural village called Ankoma in Kwahu-East, Ghana. There focus is to help develop Ankoma in terms of Healthcare, Education and Sanitation, whilst helping the people of Ankoma to become self-sufficient. Craig and Asha Richardson, the founders of the Ankoma Outreach charity, first discovered Ankoma back in 2012, since then they have welcomed many volunteers to Ankoma to help run several projects, helping babies right through to the elderly.
Hunter Hall has supported the Ankoma Outreach project in a number of ways for a few years, including sending netball and football kits, pairs of shoes and recently spare school uniform to Ankoma. They also hosted five of the Ankoma Dream children for a day in September 2018.
The Ankoma Dream Schools Choir is the most recent event in which Hunter Hall has been involved. All children from Hunter Hall, as well as choirs from Long Marton, Asby, Newlaithes, Warcop, Morland and Bolton primary schools were involved. Asha (founder of the project) and Sophie (who composed the Ankoma Dream song) visited each school earlier in the term to run a workshop teaching the song to all the pupils, and then all the schools came together with a sound team to professionally record the track in the Hunter Hall school hall last Monday.
Thanks to lovely sunshine, all the children were singing together in the courtyard sporting their charity t-shirts which had all been previously bought as a way of the children donating to this worthwhile charity. A TV crew also attended taking video footage to broadcast and the children can’t wait to see the footage broadcast and to hear the song.