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It is not easy to be a volunteer Community Coordinator for GambiaRising. As every Peace Corps volunteer knows, it is complicated to be seen as someone in your village who might have extra money. Now imagine if it was your job to pay school costs for those in need in your community. Of course, with the vast majority of the population living in poverty, the total addressable need is too great to help everyone; so you have to make choices. As a rule of thumb, we say we will help those who we believe will not go to school without that help. We know we cannot help those for whom it is difficult; we prioritize those for whom it is impossible. If they've already dropped out, that's clearly a high priority. And if an uncle has started looking for a husband for a girl student, that's even higher.
Even though funds were tight last year, a birthday fundraiser by a returned Peace Corps volunteer and a generous year's end gift from another, gave us the confidence to create a new program in a region we had not served before: the Lower River Region. Over the course of the 2019-20 school year, we gave new scholarship support to 225 students. Our Coordinator there, Alieu Gaye, lives in Misera and teaches at Kuli Kunda, so those are our two bases in the region.
Of course, word has spread. In Alieu's home village, many people lined up at his door asking for help. Most were already in school and didn't qualify for our program. As a result, he told me, "Now some of my neighbors hate me." (By custom, any one who comes into funds should be sharing some of it with friends and family. "But they are not my funds," he patiently explains.) And more than a few of those who came calling clearly qualified. Children who had alredy dropped out. Orphans. Children being raised by elderly grandmothers. Several girls who had moved to Casamance (Senegal) and dropped out asked if they could get support if they came back, or walked across the border to school each day. Teachers also called from other schools and asked if Alieu could come meet students they knew who had dropped out. One teacher told him of a village where not one child was going to school. Alieu has been a busy man.
We are determined to help even more young people in LRR this year. I want to zoom in on one new village to give a sense of how this happens. The village is Sare Samba. I knew of Sare Samba because for many years it was a Peace Corps training village. It lies less than a mile from the southern border of The Gambia and like many rural Gambian villages, it is not doing well.
Samba Sallah is a teacher at Sare Samba school; when he heard about our program, he asked Alieu to come visit. Samba and other teachers at the school had been doing what they could to help the most needy in the village, but their means are limited, and no one knew who would be posted there from year to year. Gambian teachers are notoriously underpaid, and COVID-19 has created economic peril for every family in the country. After meeting with Samba, he started interviewing students. Including:
Abass was born in Sare Samba village. He lost his parents when he was a baby, and was raised by his grandmother. She has struggled just to feed him, and at the age of 7 he has never been to school. With our support, he will start 1st grade when schools are able to open.
Twenty years, ago, Fatoumata’s mother was going to school in the Kombo and, unmarried, became pregnant. She dropped out of school and returned to live with her own mother in Sare Samba. When Fatoumata was 3, her mother returned to the Kombo and she was raised by her grandmother. But after completing 9th grade, her grandmother couldn’t afford the costs any longer and she dropped out. When our Coordinator was visiting Sare Samba, Fatoumata approached him and asked he could help older girls as well. “Of course,” he replied. And Fatoumata will be starting 10th grade when schools re-open.
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<-- Fatou and Abdoulie's parents have died; they are being raised by their grandmother. The school's headmistress reports that their attendance is irregular and that she has been personally supplying them with books and other needs for school.
When Alieu returned from his day in Sare Samba, he had 34 more young people on his Waiting List.
Every year, we walk a tightrope between need and our ability to help those who have nowhere else to turn. I am certain that our 16 Coordinators will have long waiting lists by the time we fix our starting budgets in a few weeks.
All we can do now is ask everyone who possibly can, to pitch in. It takes $3 per month to support student in grades 1 through 6. To support a teenager in grade 10 through 12 is only $10 per month. Let's face it, the world is pretty broken right now. The only people who are going to give these kids a chance are those who have a relationship with The Gambia, their friends and their families. That's it. If not us, then who?
Please help give them a chance.
Mike McConnell
Managing Trustee
GambiaRising
www.gambiarising.org
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