Study-abroad students return the favor

Moved by their experiences during a summer studying in Africa, U.Va. students have found ways to thank the communities that embraced them.

The students — both graduate and undergraduate — organized funding for a number of community development projects after returning to Charlottesville. They hope their efforts — providing clothing for orphans, expanding access to clean drinking water in a rural village in South Africa and creating a computer lab for young people growing up in a Moroccan slum — will open the door to a more hopeful future.

Students involved in the projects attended interdisciplinary study-abroad programs sponsored by the College: an intensive French language and Moroccan civilization course offered by the French department and based in Rabat; or “People, Culture and Environment,” sponsored by the departments of anthropology and environmental sciences and based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“We saw women begging for money for their babies” in Morocco’s city streets, said Gwen Calisch, a first-year graduate student in politics. “We saw men in the streets without limbs, begging for money. We saw dirty children in the streets. You knew they weren’t getting fed.”

Students who returned from South Africa in 2003 established the University Giving Tree to raise money and coordinate other activities on behalf of selected community development projects in South Africa.

One Giving Tree project raised money for a new well to increase the supply of potable water in the South African village of Venda in Limpopo Province, where the students spent a week last summer. Two undergraduate engineering students helped dig the 195-foot well.

To raise money for their “computer café” project in Morocco, students sold water and sodas at U.Va. football games and used the funds to buy nine surplus computers. A contact in Morocco is arranging for Internet access.

“The main thought with the computer project was to combat kids getting drawn into fundamentalism by giving them access to different world views — the news and voices from around the world,” said Ashley Silver, a third-year student who is pursuing a double major in foreign affairs and economics with a concentration in Africa and a minor in French.

“This is a small start,” Silver said. “But I feel like I’m actually making a difference. It’s a way to create more awareness in America of the rest of the world and awareness in the world of Americans doing something positive and unselfish.”