I won't commit to any project without first visiting the school or village, meeting with stakeholder elders, parents, students, and teachers, and learning from them what they want and need. Cue Nwawasua.

I learned about Nwawasua, a rural farming village in the wester Bono region of Ghana, from a teacher who once worked in the area. She told me about a large number of orphans living there who cannot attend school. The community takes them in, but they don't have enough money to pay their school fees.

When I visited, I discovered more than 25 orphans wandering around in the middle of the day. Then I visited with the village chief and his council. They want more for the kids, but they don't have options. 

The chief and council met with the regional chief, who enthusiastically welcomed our support and gifted us a building we can renovate.

They shared that the area has little internet connectivity. The local school principal also shared that there are only a few working computers, teachers must travel 30 minutes by bus to print classroom materials, and there are limited curriculum texts in the classrooms.

Based on these findings, we are building the Nwawasua Reading Clinic: a library and internet cafe. The library will serve the orphans with a trained librarian who can teach them to read, school children who need additional support and access to curriculum texts, and the entire community with choice pleasure reading materials. The internet cafe will provide teachers and community members with wifi access, printing capability, computer research and learning opportunities, and food (a daily meal for the orphans). The internet cafe also generates funding to sustain operations over time.

The entire project is being built by community volunteers--the chief organized work groups to show up on designated days, spread out so they can still attend to their farming and personal chores. 

This is a community committed to its values, namely taking care of their own: nobody is left behind. And with Reading the World's help, they now have a pathway forward not only for the orphans learning to read, but the entire community engaging in global enterprise through internet connectivity.