When: Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. CST
Where: Virtual Zoom Gathering from ANYWHERE in the world!
Schedule:
5:00 - 5:30 PM CST | Welcome, Hang Out, & Check Tech Specs 
5:30 - 6:00 PM CST | Program & Investment Opportunity

I hope you can join me as OneVillage Partners celebrates its 10th year of remarkable work in Sierra Leone.  I was lucky to become involved with this effort back in 2008, even before the organization OneVillage Partners was in existence.  Here's my story.

In the winter of 2006, I met Jeff Hall (the eventual founder of OneVillagePartners) when he arrived at my house to pick up his 3rd-grade daughter, who was outside sledding with my 3rd-grade son.  My wife, Suzy, and I invited Jeff in and he said that he had just returned from a trip to Sierra Leone.  We inquired, and he shared with us something quite remarkable.

Jeff told us that he had lived and worked in remote mountain villages in the eastern region of Sierra Leone as a Peace Corp engineer for two years in the late 1980s.  After he left, the country was subsumed by a horrifying decade-long violent conflict in the 1990s.  The villages where Jeff lived had been destroyed and the farms devastated.  His friends spent 10 years living in refugee camps.  When they returned to their homes, they found buildings in tatters, food difficult to grow, access to fresh water scarce, malaria and other diseases rampant, health care and education for families and children untenable, and improvised roofs over houses incapable of keeping them dry.  Compelled to lend a hand helping the communities pull themselves out of these dire circumstances, Jeff began bringing volunteers (many from the Twin Cities) to the villages in 2006.  The difficult process of partnering to restore a sustainable way of life had begun.  With infrastructure in need of rebuilding, access to doctors, nurses, and medicine in need of being established, economic activities in need of revitalizing, and education in need of significant investment, the burden was heavy.  But Jeff was confident that the task was not impossible.

From the conversation that evening, I felt compelled to act as well.  Jeff and I began to discuss how to broaden Twin Cities involvement in this undertaking, particularly from the school community that connected us.  The result was a plan to incorporate me and several intrepid high school travelers from The Blake School to join this international cooperative project, to learn about the country, to better understand extreme poverty, and to reach out to our personal communities to raise awareness.  In 2008, seven students and I joined the effort, spending three weeks in Sierra Leone serving as both cultural ambassadors and aids in village schools to help teach reading and writing.  Like all others who had made the journey to meet and live with hosts from Jokibu, Foindu, and Pujehun, the experience was beyond impactful.  It broadened the narrowness of our lives in the U.S. and expanded our awareness of how our brothers and sisters—our human family—live with extreme poverty.  It gave us even more reason to act.

In 2011, we coordinated a second trip for Blake, this time with 16 student travelers.  OneVillage Partners had been at work as a formal organization for more than a year at that point.  When I arrived in the villages after this three-year hiatus, the differences were readily obvious.  I saw buildings with reliable metal roofs, people outside involved in visible economic activity, functioning wells with clean running water, nurses in each village, schools with better (and more) teachers, and movement among the villagers to give women more voice and agency in civic matters.  In reuniting with my friends, our conversations started moving away from restoring the essential mechanics of keeping the communities alive and moving towards higher order issues like how to best support new businesses, how to institutionalize well maintenance, and how to insure that girls, too, had access to school through high school.  These were all signs of progress.

With the establishment of OVP, this initiative has expanded well beyond the three village where Jeff started.  It is a model for building successful cooperative partnerships and improving lives for people living in a country that is rapidly making progress raising the standard of living and quieting the devastating echos of the tragic military conflict that still resonates.  While I did not travel with the last Blake-related OVP trip to Sierra Leone in 2018, my daughter did.  She routinely brings up stories and experiences and the connections she made with her host family to this day.  

This is good, important, impactful work.  Thank you for letting me share my story, and thank you for helping to support OneVillage Partners.