BISHOP ASSOLARI NURSERY SCHOOL
WHO WAS BISHOP ASSOLARI
Alessandro Assolari (26 August 1928 – 13 April 2005) was an Italian Roman Catholic bishop. He was ordained to the priesthood on 13 March 1954 as a member of the Missionaries of the Company of Mary, Assolari was a priest in Madagascar from then until he moved to Malawi in 1961. In 1965 he opened a new parish at Mangochi Boma, then Called Fort Johnstone.
In 1967 he met a young boy aged 10 called Joseph Kimu whom he urged to start going to school and offered to pay him school fees because his poor and widowed mother would not afford to send him to school. This little boy grew up under the mentorship of Assolari and became a priest on 27th July 1985.
Rev. Fr. Joseph Kimu
WHO WE ARE
Bishop Assolari Nursery School was officially opened on June the 14th, 2007. It was built in Kausi Village, Traditional Authority Chimwala with the help of the staff of Banca Popolare di Bergamo in Italy and other friends in memory of Bishop Alessandro Assolari who was the first bishop of the diocese of Mangochi. He was bishop of Mangochi for about 35 years and during these years he worked so much in the establishment of many educational and health centres. We have about 400 children registered in three classrooms making an average of 140 kids per class.
The classrooms are not enough because of the numerous requests that arrive from the parents. In both nursery schools (St. John and Bishop Assolari), we have over 95% Muslim children. But we have always assured the parents that no child will be forced to convert to Catholicism because our aim is to help any child regardless of religion, tribe or ethnic background.
We need funds to build more classrooms, teachers’ houses and a bigger refectory. The children who have attended this nursery school and who now attend Kausi’s or other villages’ primary schools learn faster than their classmates who never attended nursery school but just went straight to primary school from the village. In this nursery school, we have some disabled children who need special care by specially qualified teachers. Unfortunately, we have no funds to hire such kind of teachers