Lessons Abroad: Local couple educates, plans to establish schools nationwide
Several months ago, I followed a team of volunteers to cover their work at an orphanage in Haiti.
The experience was phenomenal.
Since then, daily life has seemed a little flat; it’s difficult to feel that sense of inspiration and passion to make a difference in the world.
Pakistan’s got a famine, Afghanistan’s still wrought with war and this semester looks like Mount Everest. It’s a waiting game to finish term, get that much closer to graduating and get back to working for change.
Yet change is happening right here in the Mid-Michigan area. This week I met Winn residents Sheila and Jim Carroll, who are working towards change little by little.
Ten years ago, after learning about the need for educational materials in remote villages, they founded a nonprofit organization called Education in a Box, setting up schools in needy areas.
“Jim and I are life-long educators,” Sheila said. “When we heard that, we said ‘Well, we can do that.’”
They began developing and fine-tuning a curriculum for kindergarten to eighth grade, making a long-term commitment to communities to implement and support schools.
Beginning with a school in Bemali, a village near Visak, India, they have expanded to include eight schools total. In addition to the Indian school, five are in Nigeria, one in Ethiopia and one in Sierra Leone.
The curriculum is unique, using high-quality literature, oral tradition and learning-by-doing as teaching methods.
The nonprofit does more than handing out books. The Carrolls believe in cultivating relationships with communities. By 2008, the organization had grown to include community work like implementing wells and building facilities for teachers and the project was renamed Worldwide Educational Resources.
“It’s not just a go in, start it, leave,” Sheila said. “It’s a long term commitment to these people.”
It takes vision and patience to stick to these goals. Living Books Curriculum, a buyable line of the WEC curriculum, pays basic costs, but fundraising for donations is crucial to supplementary overseas operations.
Yet, the Carrolls are optimistic and determined. Their ultimate goal is to establish 1,000 schools.
“(Education) is like that saying, ‘If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll live forever,’” Jim said. “With an education, the sky is the limit.”
It’s a wake-up call that steps can be taken to help people from the dull-seeming chrysalis of humdrum life.
Like the butterfly effect theory, even the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami on the other side of the world.
Small steps grow into greater things. Worldwide Educational Resources causes tsunamis worth of impact from right here at home. And that’s a change I can believe in.
