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Published: April 20th 2010
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Miami, Miami, Miami
This weekend, I took off for Florida, for the first time ever.
In the last year, my two friends whom I lived with in Ghana, Margaret and Romina, and I have started a project we named (with the help of my mom) Agbogba Computers, The Innovation of a Nation: Ghana (ACTION: Ghana). For this project, we are aiming to supply the primary school we volunteered at in Ghana, St. Joseph’s Agbogba Anglican Primary, in the outskirts of Accra, with enough computers so that they may effectively teach information and communications technology classes to the students, as well as keep a record of who goes to the school and the grades they receive.
As of now, the school has over 500 students and not a single computer. While there, Maggie and I would watch the teachers facilitate ITC computer classes by drawing parts of the computer (such as a mouse, a keyboard, a monitor, etc.) on the blackboard. These children, much like the vast majority of the children in Sub-Saharan Africa, will otherwise grow up not knowing how to operate a computer, or never having the opportunity to “surf” the web. While there, the headmistress would ask us at
least once a week to bring computers to the school someday. Well, we are hoping we can.
While we have gotten a small amount of funding and have set up a non-profit bank account and a Facebook fan page, ACTION has been slow going, due to a lack of time on our parts and a lack of connections and ideas about how to go about best implementing our project.
Well, a couple months ago, Romina suggested that we apply to go the Clinton Global Initiative University meeting in Miami. We never dreamed we would get accepted, especially since we did not apply until 2 days before the deadline, but low and behold, miracles do happen!
We were selected as one of 1,300 students (out of 4,000 who applied) to attend this conference put on by the Clinton Foundation.
To attend, we had to submit a Commitment to Action, which for us, was our plan to effectively place computers in the school in Ghana.
The Clinton Global Initiative was established by Clinton in 2005 to convene world leaders to devise plans and implement them to help solve the world’s most critical problems. After it was shown that CGI was a success,
Clinton launched CGI-U, the same type of program, only for university students.
At this year’s conference, all 50 states were represented (I was the only one “from” Idaho), along with 82 other countries. Each student or group of students made commitments in the fields of education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, or public health.
Ours fell under the education sector, naturally.
He heard about so many inspiring stories in which students have successfully done some good in the world. It's pretty incredible.
I was given a travel assistance award that included a free round-trip ticket to Miami and two night’s stay in a hotel for free. Sometimes, I just don’t know how I get so lucky. Without the award I would not have been able to pay for myself to go. Thank you CGI! No complaints there. 😊
While at the conference, the three of us came up with great ideas about how to move our project forward, starting with finding a non-governmental organization to partner with so that we can share their 501c3 status and be eligible for tax exempt grants. That step will make it muchhhh easier for us to solicit funding for
the computers and for shipping to get them over there.
We found a few different brands of computers to research and look into sending, and we were confronted with the idea of setting up a mentoring program between University of Ghana students and primary school students. So many exciting prospects! One of the most important things that came to light for us is that we cannot simply give the school a couple of computers and expect our jobs to be done.
During the conference, we got to hear words of advice from such amazing people as Bill Clinton himself; John Podesta - CEO of the Center for American Progress and the former White House Chief of Staff for the Clinton Administration; Michele Norris - NPR correspondent, All Things Considered; musicians - The Ruse, Pharrell Williams and Kenna; Mandy Moore; Heather Graham; Kalpen Modi - White House Office of Public Engagement, House, Harold and Kumar; Peirre Garcon - Indianapolis Colts wide receiver, and a Haitian; Andy Revkin - Dot Earth blogger for the New York Times; Jolly Okot - former Sudanese child soldier, founder of Invisible Children; among many others.
Margaret came up with the idea of having business cards made
for us so that we could easily pass around our information for networking purposes. Woohoo! Pretty excited about having my own business card, not going to lie about that!
So, as for Miami:
For the record, I quite appreciated that the conference was held in Florida. Miami has a certain Latin flair to it, which I loved, and I got a couple hours to lay by the pool before the conference started on Friday, and I can’t say I minded that either.
Florida in a way reminded me of Mexico, which in turn reminded me of the vacations we took as a family to Mexico when I was growing up. I found myself (and still find myself) wishing we could have another one of those family vacations someday. (Hint, hint.)
Anyway, for ACTION, the three of us still have a lot of work to do - but now we have a better understanding of how to get that work started. Anddddd we also have a few pictures of Bill, on top of it all.
Not a bad weekend, if I do say so myself.
Much love,
Cari
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Amanda Trainor
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YAY!
Hey Cari! Loved your writing as usual! The pics were a nice addition on this one lol I mean they always are, but I like the captions...Billy hahha. Anyhow keep up the awesome blogging!