Menifee family, PTA takes sharing global

Nathan Sapong, 10, visited his parents’ homeland of Ghana, West Africa nearly two years ago. The state of education he said he saw there was in stark contrast to what he enjoys as a fifth-grader at Evans Ranch Elementary in Menifee.

Books, computers and pizza are some of the things Nathan said children in the U.S. enjoy, but are rarities in Ghana, a coastal country with a population of approximately 23.4 million. Rural villages dot the countryside, where recently permitted free public schools are springing up in sheds and under trees.

As the family drove through the rural village of Ejisu, Nathan’s mother Belinda Sapong said he asked why the kids wore uniforms but had no shoes and no backpacks.

It made him want to share.

When the family returned home, Nathan started taking books off his shelf.

“I had too many books, and I asked my mom if I could send them to the kids in Ghana,” he said. “Then I asked my friends about it and they told their mothers and then a lot of schools in Menifee starting collecting books.”

That was in April 2008. The project started by Nathan has now grown to a collection of more than 40,000 books, which are temporarily being housed in a donated storage space in Menifee. Books for the project are no longer being collected.

The Menifee Valley Council PTA has named the gargantuan gesture Project Need to Read, and has made it their sponsored project of the year. The council’s goal is to raise enough money to ship the books to Ghana.

According to Sapong, who is also chairwoman for the project, it will take about $4,500 to $5,000 to put the books on a ship out of the Los Angeles harbor, en route to Ghana.

So far they have about $500, she said.

The goal is to now see the shipment of the books come to fruition. Once the books reach Ghana, Sapong said the nonprofit group Childs Rights International (a partner of UNICEF) has agreed to distribute them. The books will be used to set up school libraries and book clinics in the rural areas.

According to a news release, public education in Ghana was not free until recently; resulting in a high rate of illiteracy in the developing country. Parents now have the option of sending their school-age children to school instead of sending them out to learn trades such as fishing, farming, cattle herding or gold mining – requiring these children to engage in any of these trades is in essence, a form of child labor.

While the rural families are embracing the newfound concept of free education, they still struggle to provide school uniforms, text books, stationary and other needed supplies, the news release stated.

Sapong’s 13-year-old niece Kimberly Glover moved to the U.S. four years ago and attends Menifee Valley Middle School. Kimberly and her sister LeAnn, 10, attended school through third grade and fifth grade in Ghana’s capitol city, Accra.

Even in the international school the sisters attended, Kimberly said they had to share text books and there were no libraries. Students learn two languages, English and Twi, she said.

“My mom would send us books so we could read in English,” Kimberly said. “I would be so excited when the books would come in a package.”

Starting March 2, several schools in the Menifee Union School District will conduct a coin drive for Project Need to Read. Students and their families will be invited to contribute, so the books can get to Ghana.

Contributions can also be sent to Project Need to Read at Menifee Valley Council PTA, 26025 Newport Road, Suite A #235, Menifee, Calif., 92584.

“It is a project that the kids started and we are helping them to push it through to the end,” Sapong said. “We want the books to get where they were meant to go.”

Maggie Avants is the education editor for SWRNN. Reach her at maggie.avants@swrnn.com. Follow SWRNNedu on Twitter!

Tags: Belinda Sapong, Childs Rights International, Evans Ranch Elementary, Ghana, Kimberly Glover, Maggie Avants, Menifee, Menifee Valley Council PTA, Menifee Valley Middle School, Nathan Sapong, Project Need to Read, SWRNN, UNICEF

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Education, Local News, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.