Dear Dr. Dan Gottlieb,
Welcome to life after Africa. My dear and talented friend, Andrea Green, mentioned that you have recently returned from South Africa, and she thought you might be interested in learning about our pen pal project.
In a nutshell, this love affair started with my college roommate, Joanne Trangle. She was called to Africa when we were eighteen. She's been travelling the continent for, well, a long time now....around 30 years. During that time, she gave birth to twins (one with Down's Syndrome), and years after that, she and her husband Evan adopted a son from Ethiopia. They live in Minneapolis. Joanne continues to bring more people over to fall deeply in love with Africa through her non-profit travel-service organization, Kuchanga Travel. Her twins will be bar-mitzvahed this December in Abayudaya, one of the Jewish communities in Uganda.
The story then fast-forwards to 2009 when Joanne asked if my students wanted pen pals. Well, yeah, sure....
I gotta tell you, the day you open an envelope addressed to you from a kid in Uganda is the best day of the school year. It makes the school year a COOL year. That first class will graduate high school this year.
The following year, I had a very special group of sixth graders, and when they learned that young women were not going to school because they might be embarrassed to use a latrine that had no doors, they decided to build them one. So, Joanne organized this project and got a wonderful and talented engineer in Uganda, Moses Bagonza, to manage the construction of a compostable latrine designed by Engineers Without Borders in Los Angeles.
We did a beautiful tile-painting fundraising project, with the support from Radnor Educational Foundation, where kids in our community painted tiles that I shipped to Uganda. This wall stands in front of the latrine, sharing messages of love and peace from our school to theirs.
The summer of 2012, I travelled to the Bupala Primary School (Iganga District, Bupala Village) to see this project through to its completion. The villagers were deeply appreciative of the attention paid to their school and community. The latrine was the first new construction in this village in over a decade. My time spent with the students was really the greatest part of the journey.
While the school has a bore-hole well on the property, and now a new latrine facility, it seemed that the next problem that needed to be addressed was nutrition. So, since last February, our school has been providing lunch for the 600 children of Bupala P/S. We feed the school for a mere $125/week which is raised through grassroots efforts like bake sales and lemonade stands.
Raising awareness and funds is a constant worry. So, moving the Bupala School towards sustaining their own lunch program is my first priority these days. Towards that end, I'm hosting a family chat event called COMPASSION IN ACTION at our school on the evening of November 21. The purpose of the evening is to explore what small acts we can commit to as individuals, families and as a school community that might make the world a little better. We are also honoring Phil Hughes, a local guy who was in the Peace Corps and has started a thriving business called Mavuno Harvest that is selling organically grown dried fruit from Uganda in Whole Foods and other health stores in the region. He is transforming lives in the village where the fruit is being harvested...and I'm hoping to help the Bupala School prepare to be another source of fruit for this business in a few years.
I'm also working on pulling a crew of people together to help out in the village next summer, including some medics and others who are interested in helping develop an organic garden and a textile project. Meanwhile, I hope to keep the communication flowing between the children here and in Uganda. Anyone who wants to join us is more than welcome; just contact me at jodi.sabra@rtsd.org and I'll be happy to share the information.
Oh yeah! One other small act we're undertaking to raise funds for our friends involves recycling used ink and toner cartridges. We've teamed up with Laser Charge, Inc. to help with this effort. If any businesses in the Philly region are looking for a place to unload their empty ink cartridges, we're more than happy to turn that trash into recyclable treasure that will help us feed our friends in Uganda. That's about it for now.
Because you're Dan Gottlieb, I'll tell you: this fills me with fear and anxiety. I'm a big-picture gal with very few of the detail skills that are useful when it comes to orchestrating the nuts and bolts of my big ideas. I really need help from anyone who has expertise to share. A little bit goes a long way in Uganda, and the same holds true here in my tie-dyed classroom. I would love to hear from just about anyone who can help me figure out how to manifest these dreams. Too often I find myself proclaiming: WHAT WAS I THINKING?!
