Minister Anite lights-up Arua Hill PS with solar panels.

Hellen Nelson, a P.6 pupil of Arua Hill primary school (PS) in Arua Central Division, Arua City is one of the many pupils who have been grappling with the power challenge at the school.

This continued cry by the pupils and the teachers of Arua Hill PS has, however, been addressed by the former pupil of the school, Evelyn Anite, also the Minister of Investment and Privatization.

Anite took the pupils, teachers and Arua City authorities by surprise on Monday when she surfaced at the school with solar panels which will be connected to light-up the entire school premises.

“I’m very excited! This is my primary school, I finished here in 1998 and I celebrated my 38th birthday some days back, and I am happy to come back to my primary school. So many people go back to their primary schools and they don’t find them but my school block, my school is still in existence and that is very exciting,” Anite said.

“The learners are equally very excited and I see potential in them, we just need to continue encouraging them. I gave the school solar panels for classroom blocks P.5, P.6, P.7, and the administrative block, but I have also celebrated my birthday with them with two Bulls and on top, I’m coming back to paint my classroom block,” Anite added.

Anite’s donation comes as a ray of hope for Hellen who will be joined by many other pupils for next year’s primary leaving examinations (PLE).

“We are so happy for the solar panels and may God bless Hon. Anite! We appreciate what has happened today. We shall use the solar light for reading and we are so glad about it. There is no stable power here. Even though you come early at school to read, you find there is no power but now with these solar panels, I am hopeful that we who are going to P.7 next year will find it easy to revise our books to pass,” Hellen stressed.

Similarly, Gift Amagule, the Arua Hill PS Head Teacher said the solar panels have come timely to address the power shortage they had at the school.

“The solar panels donated by Anite have really made us very happy because they have added to the issue of the light shortage which we had. I’m very sure many issues are going to be improved; security matters, lighting throughout the night, you know we don’t have stable power besides, you know we also have gadgets that use power. Now with this stable solar and the WENRECo itself, we are quite sure that many things are going to improve,” Amagule said.

“Definitely this will improve performance because the children who are nearby will have to revise whether at night or whatever time, this will be okay for the pupils and teachers to work hard for better performance,” Amagule added.

Arua Hill PS has an enrolment of 2,135 primary school pupils and 145 nursery school pupils, all totaling to 2,280 pupils. The school is one of the highly populated Universal Primary Education (UPE) schools in Arua City with a record of good performance over the years.