A Kenyan boy screams as he sees Kenyan policeman with a baton approach the door of his home in the Kibera slum of Nairobi 17 January 2008. Hundreds of police who had earlier clashed with supporters of Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga at the entrance of the slum moved into the shantytown and did a house to house search for protesters.
You first need to believe that the world around you is not “given” once and for all, that it can be changed, and that you yourself can be changed while applying yourself to the job of changing it. You must assume that the state of the world could be different than it is now, and that how different it may eventually become depends on what you do, that no less than the state of the world- past, present, and future- may depend on what you do or desist from doing. In other words: you believe that you are, simultaneously, an artist able to create and shape things, and the product of such creation and shaping.
Back in March I wrote a post about my friend Jason Doherty’s work opening a school for girls in Kenya called The Daraja Academy. The school and the project are currently gaining some momentum, so I have called on the readers and members of the Intrepid Classroom to support the project. I will let you read the details of that post and watch the most recent videos for yourself here.
I want to take this time to write a short post asking you, a community of international teachers, to answer the call as well and think about sponsoring and facilitating Daraja Clubs at your schools. I am quite certain that I am too close to this project to be objective about it. For many of you, this is probably just another aid project on a list of many. Many of you are probably already working, in some capacity, with NGOs and other aid groups.
So what makes Daraja unique and how will the experience of working with this project be beneficial not only for the girls who will benefit from a world class education where there was none, but for your students as well?
The main benefit is the simplicity of this project. It is run from a home, by a manageable board, and a few key people. Students who get involved will quickly gain a sense of ownership and connectivity with not only the organization, but hopefully with the students who will be attending the Academy. Establishing a Daraja Club does not only mean raising money, but building a relationship with the founder, the students, and hopefully other students around the world who are intimately involved with Daraja. The grassroots nature of this project will teach students the power of concentrated effort to truly make a change. This is not a large organization who will send pictures of sponsored children, but rather a school that is being built by the efforts of people like your students.
My hope is to have at lest five separate schools worldwide with their own Daraja Club. With the help of you, their teacher, or me at Intrepid Classroom, I hope that these clubs will learn how to canvas their peers for support, create informative and creative multi-media presentations and commercials, raise funds of course, and eventually establish relationships with the students not only from other clubs around the world, but more importantly those girls attending the school itself. For older students, this could perhaps open doors to internship possibilties.
In the edublogospehre, we are always discussing the importance of student learning networks; I see these clubs as a great focal point where students can work independently, but also within the boundaries of a shared goal.
My request is simple please either consider sponsoring a Daraja club with your students or send them to IntrepidClasroom and see if they won’t start one on their own. At the very least please read Jason’s blog to keep up with what is happening on the ground in Kenya.
I am reading a book called Three Cups of Tea, by David Oliver Relin about a man named Greg Mortenson, who after failing to summit K2 stumbles into a small village in Northern Pakistan called Korphe and promises to build the people of the village a school. Reading this book coupled with my friend Jason’s work with his school the Daraja Academy has got me thinking. What am I doing? What is my purpose?
The last few days have been a series of intensive soul searching journeys for me to find out the answers to these questions. While it may appear that I am being a bit melodramatic about the whole affair, I do take my life goals and plans very seriously. I have never wanted to simply live your average middle class life. Even as a kid, I imagined that I would do bigger things. I imagined that someday, someone would write books about things that I had done, or better yet I would write them myself.
While I am not shy about admitting that I have had my share of self aggrandizing feats, I still feel like my life is building. I haven’t done enough.
That is when it hit me; tonight, here in bed, as my wife lay sleeping reading about how this guy Mortenson had a huge set back in his plan, and his girl friend dumped him, I realized just how alone and miserable he must have felt in the Richmond district of San Francisco. I felt sorry for him. He was not some hero out changing the world. He was a mortal who was broken. I felt connected to him.
I guess what I am trying to say is that we needn’t change the world all at once and all alone. We can allow it to change us, back and forth, until we become something we can recognize and live with. I have been racked with guilt that I came to Doha to make money, and that being fired was the price I paid for turning my back on my true nature, but my true nature is to simply be the peace that I want to spread. The kids I interacted with here needed education and guidance just as much as the kids in Kenya or Korphe, and I was, until the plug was pulled, getting through to them.
I am a teacher. That is what I was born to do. I was put on this earth to interact with people and try to better understand each other. I prefer working with young adults, because that is the age I felt I needed someone most, eighth grade to be specific. I am realizing that I do not need a classroom to teach. I simply need to be the peace I seek here and now. Where ever I am, interacting with whomever I meet. I am not angry at myself or others for how they perceive my actions. Perhaps there is a hint of hostility in the way I see the world, and that is where I need to start the change.
I may not be building schools in Pakistan or Kenya, but I am on a path that will lead me some place worth being. Actually this very path, my journey is in itself the most amazing thing I will ever experience. And if there is no one there to write the book about it when it is done, you could say you were reading it here all along.
End note: For all the edubloggers out there, here is my question. This was originally written for my personal blog, as a way for me to sort out my thoughts and share my thoughts with the small community of people that I have built there, but I also see the value of posting it here. This is where I am having a hard time separating private from professional. Wouldn’t other teachers or perhaps parents who would read a blog post like this not benefit, from seeing this side of a teacher? I guess I will just double post till I figure it out.
I do now want to write about how I met Jason Doherty, or the months we spent in his hospital room while his shattered body mended from a car crash I should have been involved with, but due to my nine lives, I missed. I won’t mention how I rescued him from yet another car crash in the Mexican desert, or the many nights we sat beside fires talking, drinking, and growing.
They say that woman are better at building and maintaining friendships, because men are afraid to open their hearts. Jason Doherty is proof that this is not true, because he is one of the most important people in my life, and I am ashamed that I have allowed my own life to be the focal point of my attention. I have allowed his victories to go unnoticed for too long. Now is the time to tell the world what he is doing, and how you, as educators, can hook your wagon to his star and see where you end up. You will not be disappointed. If you believe in education and a better future please read on:
We both had an idea that we would be teachers in Mr. Tovani’s Environmental Studies class. We were students who under achieved because we knew the system the other teachers were selling was broken. We’d eventually both get through college and jump through the hoops society demands of its educators, but we knew at sixteen that the world society was selling was not the one we wanted to buy. We dreamed of bigger things. We dreamed of revolutions. We, the two of us, would wake the world up and spread the light we found everywhere we looked. We were the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…and no car accidents or Tsunamis were going to stop us.
Fast forward sixteen years, two wives, a baby, a few college degrees, a few football teams coached, trips to every continent on earth and here we are. I am some how unemployed, gagged, and bound in Doha, and my friend is ready to make our old dream come true.
While my path has led me on my own journey, one I wouldn’t trade for the anything in the world, his path is now leading him to his dream. I am sure that one day we will be sitting beneath a tree, as a fire crackles, the stars will shine like our promises come true, and we will drink tea, we will hug; our hair maybe white, and our children will be asleep, but we will have arrived together, finally, in Africa.
Jason is the person who planted the Africa seed in my body. It is because of him, I needed to go to Mozambique and teach for two years. It is because of him that I went and met my wife and start my teaching career. This year he is finally going himself.
The story of how theDaraja Academygot started and funded and ready to admit students is a long one, and one that even I am not too clear on. I will let Jason’s work tell his own story of how he and his wife single handily started a school where girls from the slums of Nairobi will cultivate a community of individuals with a sense of cultural awareness, social conscience, and environmental responsibility, all while instilling talents that will enable them to open doors to a global society.
My job is to use my network & web presence to share Jason’s dream with as many people as I can. I have inserted links to his school’s site, Facebook groups, a video below, so that everyone who reads this post will share the link with as many people as you can. Link to this post. Write your posts. Twitter it to your networks. Get the word out their and let’s get as many people as possible to get in touch with the Carr Educational Foundation and help in any way they can. Share money, volunteer to teach, send books, send your love, send karma, send, share and then share some more. This could be a great project for your students to take up and help them become involved with fund raising, raising awareness, or perhaps your school could adopt Daraja and begin corresponding once they are up and running. The possibilities are endless. once I have a job again, I will get to work more on these ideas.
In the midst of everything that is happening in the world- all the anger, the fear, and the questions I face, I see this school as some kind of an answer. Like I said, I cannot go there myself now, because my life path is headed in other directions, but I can share Jason’s message and hope that the Daraja Academy will be a success, so when it is time for our paths to cross again, I can sit under that tree with my best friend and know that, way back in high school, we were right. We will know we won. Two old men will sit together in the darkness, and we will have proven to the world that it all it takes to make things right is a bit of love and hope.
I love you Jason and I am typing these words now with tears in my eyes. Good luck. See you soon, some how, someplace.
Photo found here
