Sunday, March 27, 2011

Peace Corps benefits ... people.

Here I am. COS. Close of Service. In Ouagadougou. Preparing for the end of my Peace Corps stint. Unreal. I am here spending time with my Peace Corps group, enjoying the good company, being reminded of the wonderful connections I've made (and am making) with some extremely interesting, motivated, intelligent, fun Americans.

My good friend Julie is one of those Americans, and she's got a pretty ambitious project going on in her teeny tiny little village down south near Ghana. I have been very lucky in finding people to help me with getting funding for Denise's school year, so I wanted to share this other meaningful project with everyone who reads my blog.

"Each year hundreds of students in this rural district of Burkina Faso are unable to continue with their formal education due to a lack of resources and a dearth of available places in the only secondary school within a 35 kilometer radius. These out-of-school youth then have few options other than following in their parents' footsteps, which means subsistence farming for boys, and marriage and babies for girls. To combat the social and economic problem posed by this growing wave of out-of-school, unskilled, and unemployed youth, the community is creating a vocational school to provide young people with real-world skills and continuing education."