Success, and Need

First, updates on two remarkable students:

We first met Mariama Dampha in 2013 through a Peace Corps volunteer whose "host family" had taken Mariama in after both her own parents had died. GambiaRising donors began supporting her education in 10th grade when she was accepted to the boarding program at Armitage in Janjanbureh, and then, with the top math scores ever recorded by a girl from Armitage, through four more years studying Public Health at the University of The Gambia.

Mariama graduated cum laude from UTG, and has just been offered a job as a Public Health Officer, assigned to the Albreda Health Clinic in the North Bank Region. Way to go, Mariama!

The second student is Fatou Kineh Ndow, who we also started supporting seven years ago, after she had already started at UTG. Her mother had taken out a loan against her income selling phone credit from her wheelchair at Westfield Circle, but was not able to continue. When we learned about this, we took over and in 2016, Fatou Kineh shocked everyone but herself when she graduated magna cum laude and was named Valedictorian of her class at UTG.

Two years later, in 2018, Fatou Kineh was celebrating again, this time when she received her Master's Degree in Mathematics from Ohio University.

Still not done, Fatou Kineh then taught math at an Ohio junior college while she looked for a PhD program that would give her the scholarship she needed. And last Fall, she found it, when she was accepted at the University of Iowa. She would also be able to pay her room and board with the income from the teaching job Iowa offered. But her student visa was now about to expire. And the U.S. government requires student visas to be renewed outside the U.S. So in December, we bought the tickets and Fatou Kineh got to go home and see her mom and grandmom back in The Gambia.

A few months after she arrived back in Iowa, the U.S. began waking up to the perils of COVID-19. Summer classes at Iowa were cancelled. The U.S. government offered speedy relief to American universities but specified that no funds could be used to help foreign students.

So again, we offered a life line and covered Fatou's room and board for the summer. What did she do with her extra time? She studied, of course. And it paid off.

Fatou Kineh has now passed another hurdle on her path to becoming the UTG's first native Gambian Professor of Mathematics.

Back in The Gambia, COVID-19 has really begun to spread as well. Health care workers near the coast are among those hardest hit. And the absence of the vital tourist trade is offset only in a very small way by empty hotels being used as quarantine centers. Curtailing rural markets has decimated many rural families, as they are the place where widows, grandmothers, and other women can earn much-needed income.

Nevertheless, schools will re-open in the next few weeks (details are still being finalized). And our waiting lists have swelled as much as we feared they might. Our budgeting process these days resembles triage, except we can't yet accept losing anyone. Dreamers we may be, but so are the grandmothers and widows who come to us, telling us they can't both feed their families and keep them in school. They know personally the consequences of not having an education, and they will not accept the same for their children. So we budget with one goal in mind: how can we help the most students. We call our approach "just enough, just in time." You will not be able to tell GambiaRising students by sight because their uniforms are not nicer or their book bags better than others at their school. But I do hope you will be able to tell a school where GambiaRising is working, because the enrollment has increased.

I could not do one of our Coordinator's jobs. They live in the communities in which they work. And too often, they find a mother and her children, or a grandmother and her grandchildren, or just a group of teenagers, at their gate or waiting for them when they come home, hoping to be able to go back to or stay in school.

Back in the U.S., we don't try to determine who is most in need, or most deserving; those are local decisions. What we do tell them is how much we can send them this month, and next, and the next after that. That is why the checks and electronic funds and monthly donations we've received this summer are so deeply appreciated: they translate directly into lives changed. Our budgeting starts with the minimum cost to keep every student we supported last year in school. After that, in order to accept new students, we'll need new donors.

The "profiles" come by whatever medium is most accessible for our Coordinators: WhatsApp, Messenger, email. Here are some examples of what our waiting list looks like right now:

As you can see, these young Gambians have no other place to turn. If we respond, they will go to school; if we don't, they will not. Most of the year, we just report in these letters. In September, we beg. To the 60 people who have donated this year, thank you. To those who donate monthly, you provide such valuable support. If you donate at the end of the year, please know we are counting on you then. If you donated last year and have not yet this year, please do so. And if you aren't yet part of GambiaRising, please squeeze these kids into your giving plans. They won't take much room. But their lives will change completely if you say "Yes" to them.

$3 per month will fund a grade-school scholarship. And $10 per month will enable a girl to complete high school instead of getting married.

Please give them a chance.

Donate

Thank you.

Mike McConnell
Managing Trustee
GambiaRising
www.gambiarising.org
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