Senior projects seek to help schools in Nicaragua and Kenya

A couple of teenagers at the Catoosa Performance Learning Center are taking their senior projects out of the country to help education mission efforts in Nicaragua and Kenya.

Principal Lamar Brown said seniors Kyle Bruce and Charlotte Leech, both 18, are working on two foreign missions to complete service learning requirements for graduation.

Mr. Bruce’s project will aid a teachers’ conference in León, Nicaragua, planned before the end of the year. Miss Leech’s project will help provide electrical power to a school in western Kenya next spring, Mr. Brown said.

Miss Leech said she hopes to help a school get solar panels that will provide electricity for a computer lab in a region that has no access to the power grid.

She’s seen television ads about impoverished countries such as Kenya since she was little, she said.

“I always wanted to do something and I never have,” she said.

She started working with her mentor, social studies teacher Tom McMahan, to develop her project as she studied Kenya.

“I didn’t know that they didn’t have electricity. I didn’t know they had to pay to go to school,” she said. “I thought they went for free just like we do.”

The experience makes her appreciate her life, school and the technology here, she said.

Mr. Bruce said he got the idea to use the Nicaraguan teacher conference for his project from Mr. Brown’s morning announcements. Mr. Brown is Mr. Bruce’s mentor on the project and a participant in the teacher conference through his church.

“My brother’s been a good five to 10 times, at least, to Nicaragua himself, so I thought I’d help out,” Mr. Bruce said.

He said students are raising money through classroom and schoolwide fundraisers.

Mr. Brown said students are collecting small personal and toiletry items and raising money to provide meals for the 500 or so teachers who will attend the conference.

Nicaraguan teachers make about $700 a year and lack many fundamental resources found in wealthier countries, said Mr. Brown, who attended last year’s teacher conference in the country.

“They want to know more. ‘How can we teach math better, how can we teach literacy better, how do we motivate the unmotivated student?’” he said. “We’re just trying to give them some tools for their toolbox.”

Mr. McMahan said a Kenyan missionary visiting his church last year talked about the fledgling Elewana Educational Project in western Kenya. The project seeks to install computer labs and electrical power in rural schools, Mr. McMahan said.

Mr. Brown said the two students’ projects are broad enough to incorporate them into activities of the school’s other 70 or so students.

In the school’s vocational area this week, juniors Chris Cagle and Zach Turner, both 17, were welding horseshoe-based art pieces while students in another area were fabricating flowers from copper to give to the teachers in Nicaragua.

The gifts aren’t just busywork, Mr. Turner said. “It also shows we care about them.”

“I think it’s a good thing,” Chris said. “Sharing is caring.”