By Frank Roby, CEO Empower African Children
Betty Nakato (U.S scholarship student), Libby Kingman (Spirit of Uganda tour manager), Gyavira Kasule (U.S. scholarship student), Peter Mugga (U.S. scholarship student), and Jack Fielder (friend of Empower) in our storage unit.
Who would have thought a simple afternoon project to move inventory to a storage unit would prove Empower’s 10-year, deeply rooted commitment to students works? But it did. What started as a mundane task became one of those revealing moments when you get to witness a hand-off from one “generation” to the next.
Three of our U.S. scholarship students were in town on Christmas break. They all gave freely of their time to help make the storage move happen as we prepared for the 22 Spirit of Uganda students who arrived on Dec. 31. What’s the big deal? If you examine most people’s images of Africa based on media and news, it is a land of survival at all costs. Think about it. We read about food aid provided to save people from starvation being raided and stolen by thugs and terrorists. How do you get from the image of Al Shabab and the brutal tactics of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — images we can’t even put in print — to Ugandan students with 3.8 GPAs at prestigious U.S. universities giving freely of their time to help the “next generation” of Empower students whom they barely know?
You do it by doing what Empower does – and does not do.
- We take 10 years or longer to prepare our students for a lifetime of influence, seeking out their unique capabilities so they can realize their promise.
- We care for them — and about them — in ways that family cares for each other.
- We provide academic rigor and supplement that with learning experiences in character, etiquette, and enterprise value to prepare them for their important role in developing their nation — economically, socially, intellectually, and culturally.
- We do not patronize them with low academic standards and low expectations while creating a false belief that basic skills will be transformative.
- We do not raise their expectations and then tell them to fend for themselves having shown them a world they cannot realize.
- We do not structure any of our programs in a way that is based on the pity factor, but rather on the reality that performance is rewarded.
Now, back to the move. The best part of this story is that when we were moving boxes, our U.S scholarship students were not thinking about how their actions were affecting others. Service had become so routine, they were just having fun sharing stories of their past and wondering what would happen with the new group. There was the story about the student who forgot to go to the bathroom before the performance (enough said on that!). Another one about how different their first impressions of America were compared to the media images they had seen. Having a great time being together, unaware of how much they have done to make life better for others, their satisfaction was in their sense of community and continuity, not in their own hard work preparing the way.
In this new year, a season of reflection and planning for each of us, maybe we can all take a cue from our Ugandan students and have some fun each day while preparing the way for someone else.
Frank Roby is CEO at Empower African Children, based in Dallas, Texas. He can be reached at Frank@EmpowerAfricanChildren.org.
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