An Ohio University professor raised $12,000 to build a school in South Africa with the help of colleagues and the Athens Rotary Club.
C. Michael Gray, associate director for OU's African American Studies Program, said he wanted to make a difference in the South African village he has been visiting with business students for more than five years.
Part of our philosophy in taking students and faculty to South Africa is that we're not just visiting there
Gray said. It's all part of giving back and helping.
Each year, a group of racially diverse OU business students visits the eastern cape of South Africa, said Business College Dean Glenn Corlett, who went with Gray in 2004. South Africa provides an interesting economic model because the country currently is dealing with changes brought about by the end of apartheid, a system of racial segregation that denied freedoms to black citizens until the early 1990s, he said.
A few years ago, students visited a small mud daycare building with the foundation for a brick building partially completed next to it, Gray said. School workers said they lacked money to complete the new schoolhouse.
We thought that it couldn't cost that much based on our standards he said.
Many of the children attending the school had lost parents or caretakers to AIDS, and the group felt compelled to help, Corlett said.
It's really sad when you go someplace and you see thirty or forty little kids ... with nowhere to go to school before kindergarten and no one to take care of them
Corlett said.
Corlett offered to present a plan to raise funds to members of the Athens Rotary Club, Gray said.
Six members of the Athens Men's Rotary Club donated $6,000, which was matched by Rotary International, he said.
After almost two years of filling out paperwork and waiting for approval, the money was sent to the Bonza Bay Rotary Club in South Africa to fund the new building, Gray said.
The schoolhouse likely will be completed by the time Gray visits again with a group of professionals in June, he said.
Business students take part in other projects, such as raising money to buy, transport and donate clothes to orphanages, he said, but this is the first time the Athens Rotary Club has been involved.
We know we've made a difference
Gray said.
- Elyse Ball
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