23rd October 2013
36c
Franciscan Sisters School For Girls - Luxor
36c
Franciscan Sisters School For Girls - Luxor
I was given a letter by an English friend to deliver to the Franciscan Girls School and this gave me the opportunity to visit and have a look around.
I met with Sister Carmeliter at the school who was kind enough to give me some history on the school and to show me around.
After a glass of lemonade, I visited many classrooms at varying grade levels and what surprise me the most, was how well behaved the girls were; from kinder to sixth grade. When I entered the glass rooms with the sister, all the girls stood up and said to me in English “Good Morning” I replied good morning and asked how are you, they all replied “very well thank you”
All the girls wore uniforms as seen in the pictures. It is indeed a very fine school and I can only imagine that all those that attend it, turn out to be very good students and well-mannered young ladies.
This is what Sister Carmeliter told me.
On arrival there was a power cut, she said this happens all the time and for about an hour, so their computer lab was not working.
The school was established in 1884. Before the school there was a black past because many children were left on the streets. When Schiaparelli came here he saw the mess and they build this house for the orphans. We still have the orphans, twenty-nine of them, even people this day say; lets go to the Italian school.
Schiaparelli had all these orphans and no one to take care of them, so he called for the nuns from Cairo. Then the nuns came and took the orphanage and then they built a school. In 1959 they started to make it bigger and added to it. There were twelve sisters at that time and they were all Italians, even the school was Italian because Italian people made it. Schiaparelli; he was an Egyptologist. At that time it was an Italian school, but not now. In 1952 when there was the revolution, the government said no more foreigners. The sisters remained here but the people had to go.
Italian Egyptologist, born in Occhieppo Inferiore (Biella), who found Queen Nefertari's tomb in Deir el-Medina in the Valley of the Queens (1904) and excavated the TT8 tomb of the royal architect Kha (1906), found intact and displayed in toto in Turin.
At the same time, he was deeply involved, from his first stay with Franciscan missionaries at Luxor in 1884, with relieving the poverty he saw among the missionaries of Upper Egypt, for whom he founded the Association to Succour Italian Missionaries (ANSMI), which expanded its work to care for Italian emigrants throughout the Near East.
Up there was a pole; there was an Italian flag. In 1952 there was a revolution and all the foreigners were sent away.
We have now about six hundred girls. We teach them everything, Computers, Religion (both Arabic & Christian), History, Geography and so on. When the girls come here they have to be five years and six months old. When they leave they are twelve years old because they have to go to the state school for high school.
The nuns at this school were very nice and friendly and it was an amazing experience meeting them and seeing so many happy girls going about their lessons. There faces were a delight and a ray of sunshine in these bad times here.