Oswego elementary school adopts sister school in Ghana

In a rural town in southern Ghana in Africa, where just one of the uneven roads is paved and residents can be seen collecting water from a nearby pond, Southbury Elementary School Principal Lindsay Allen and her students are working to create a school library.

The Oswego school, along with other schools and Fox Valley organizations, have collected books and supplies and raised money for projects at the private Catholic school in Katakyiase, Ghana. Allen, who recently returned from a winter-break trip to the town, said the books were among the first the students in Ghana had ever received.

The goal, Allen said, is to continue working with the school in Ghana, which serves students through junior high, and build relationships between Ghanaian and American students and teachers.

"My hope would be the kindness, empathy and caring we would want our kids to grow up having will become strong," she said.

For Allen, it started as a project for her doctoral program at Judson University, where she is focusing on literacy. But it soon grew beyond just a way to meet a school requirement.

Elgin-based Two Pennies Ministry had worked in Katakyiase before Allen got involved, and the two teamed up. The ministry's head, Bartlett teacher Jim Reed, years ago had his students at Sycamore Trails Elementary begin exchanging letters with students in Ghana, and they came up with the idea to collect books, he said.

First Baptist Church in Elgin and other schools in Oswego-based Community Unit School District 308 are also pitching in. Even a Michigan church that Reed has personal ties to has gotten involved, he said.

The organizations have shipped what Allen estimated were thousands of books to the school, and Southbury students collected school supplies at the beginning of the school year. The organizations also raised money to provide school lunches for months to the roughly 300 students at the school, who Reed said often do not have enough to eat and are tired and restless by the end of the school day.

Reed said they sought a more sustainable way to provide food for the students and helped create a small farm and agricultural education program at the school. Now, he said, First Baptist Church is working to create a pig farm.

Reed said on a visit to Ghana, his vehicle nearly struck a girl walking along the side of the road with her head buried in a "Dora the Explorer" book.

On a March trip to the school in Ghana, Allen helped teach students how to open and browse the books, how to organize them into a library and check them out of the library.

She said national tests are given in English, so students can benefit from reading English books.

"You feel grateful to watch kids open a book for the first time," she said.

District 308 also sent over materials from an English and language arts curriculum it no longer uses.

During her most recent trip over winter break, Allen and representatives from Two Pennies helped educators learn to use the donated material and scoped out possible sites to create the pig farm and a library building.

She said she is hoping to convert a four-room building currently missing its roof into a library, complete with bookshelves, tables and donated laptops for a technology center. She envisioned a building open to the community, with books available on farming, sewing, pregnancy or health.

She plans to have her students become pen pals with Ghanaian students, and the school's headmaster and some teachers might visit the U.S. around the start of the next school year, she said.

Most of all, she said, she wants to build a relationship between her students and teachers and those in Ghana. She hopes students can share their lives and learn about the lives of students in Katakyiase, and come to care about the world.

"When you build relationships, it's meaningful," she said. "It becomes personal."

Reed said building connections with students in Ghana helps his own students learn and see that they are significant. They might find it hard to feel like they're making a difference when they're just doing what a teacher tells them, he said.

"They saw the work they put in and the planning they did," he said. "And the effort and communication was making a difference with people who truly needed help."

Allen plans to return to Ghana in March, when she expects to begin construction on the library or piggery. Much of it will be with her own hands, she said.

She hadn't planned to go back so soon. But after the December trip, she said she had to return.