By Helen Leale-Green | Founder and CEO
We are excited to report that our 16 second-year students graduated from our programme last week. Our involvement with them doesn't stop - they are now officially our alumni and we will still provide them with as much support as they need. They are off to exciting universities including Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Tufts, Notre Dame and Northwestern in the US.
John is our student going to Dartmouth College to study Environmental Science. John comes from the poorest province of Zambia and lives with his family including his parents and nine siblings, in a very remote community that has been severely impacted by climate change and poor farming practices. John's parents are uneducated, subsistence farmers, but through his primary school teachers, his parents learnt the importance of education for their children. There were many times John struggled to stay in school. His story has been a testamony to the grit our students show in searching out and grasping opportunities.
While his metaphorical journey has been dramatic - from living alone in a mud hut so he could attend school 70 kilometres away from his parents, to going to Dartmouth - his physical journey to Our Moon also demonstrates his determination to be educated. It takes four days and includes a seven hour motorbike journey, sleeping under the stars, four buses driving in and out Democratic Republic of Congo and, finally, sharing a car for him to arrive at our site!
We are very grateful to a friend of Our Moon for connecting John with a Dartmouth alumnus, who amazingly, runs a small non-profit near John's home in Luapula Priovince, working with farmers in their community. He picked John up at Boston Logan International Airport and drove him to Dartmouth to ensure he was able to settle well.
I hope you will continue to support Our Moon and young people like John. While John has received full financial aid, his family could never have afforded the hidden costs of going to a university like Dartmouth. Through your donations, we are able to cover his SAT fees, passport, visa, SEVIS, and vaccination costs to ensure he can take up the wonderful opportunity he has been granted.
Thank you again for all your support and please feel free to contact me if you want to know more about how you can help.
With very best wishes
Helen
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