Catalina Odio ’18 and Taylor Scult ’15 spent the summer of 2015 at a school in Accra, Ghana, working with staff to paint the exterior bright colors, teaching creative writing and helping in the nursery room.
The trip was funded by a Davis Foundation Projects for Peace grant, and they recorded their experience at the school, Lila’s Child Care Foundation (LCCF), in a blog.
The summer, which Odio called transformative, was supposed to have gone differently on the other side of the continent.
The two originally won the Projects for Peace grant with a proposal to add rainwater collection tanks at a school in rural Kenya, in hopes of keeping girls learning in the classroom instead of fetching water from a stream. But the trip was called off because of violence in the country. They sent about half their grant money to the Kenyan school, where a charity installed the proposed tanks and additional gutters.
Projects for Peace, a philanthropy effort to fund undergraduates’ grassroots plans to promote peace, approved their proposal to switch to Ghana. Scult, who earned an international studies degree, knew the school where they ended up helping from previous engagements. She asked LCCF’s founder, Lila Macqueen Djaba, whether she could use help at the school building, located in a neighborhood outside the capital city of Accra.
In Ghana, they stayed at Djaba’s house, located a 1½-hour bus ride from the school, which is a nonprofit with external funding. More than 100 children ages 3 through about 14 attend for free except for a fee of about 50 cents for lunch.
They noted in their blog that, although the school was situated with a direct view of the quarry where many of the students’ parents worked, “Lila’s Childcare Foundation felt like a different place altogether.” They shared many impromptu dance breaks with students, were awed by the children’s expert drumming and showed them two of their own favorite skills: taekwondo for Odio and gymnastics for Scult.
On their first day at the school, Odio and Scult saw how rain easily swamps the neighborhood because of the lack of drainage infrastructure. They visited a teacher who had slept in a chair in her flooded house for several days, and they helped clear an extra room at the school for the woman to live in during flooding.
With each rain, Odio said she quickly thought of the problems it would cause: “This means that at least half of the community members are going to be sleeping in wet rooms tonight, all their stuff is going to be wet and it can’t dry until it stops raining. A lot of students aren’t going to be in school [because of it]. So rain is a really big deal. It’s really disruptive.”
Wanting to contribute beyond their assistance in class and with the building improvements, the two taught creative writing, with the goal of introducing one of many potential platforms for student voices. While developing this idea in collaboration with Lila, Lila also shared with them her need for further capital improvements to the school, and the three of them set up a gofundme. A little less than a year after Odio and Scult’s return stateside, $2,000 had been raised, which went towards expanding LCCF.