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Local group with goal of empowering the poor, at home and abroad, holds fundraising carnival Date published: 11/22/2009
By ROB HEDELT When University of Mary Washington seniors Kelly Landau and Dave Moore started their morning yesterday, they weren't leisurely sipping coffee or checking e-mails from friends. Soon after the sun was up, they joined a dozen or so other students setting up tables, mounting posters and hooking up sound for musicians at a carnival in Fredericksburg's Hurkamp Park to raise money for poor Africans in a village a world away. "We were there in Tonhon in Côte d'Ivoire this past summer," said Moore, president the Students Empowering the Poor chapter at UMW. "We saw the conditions that the children live in--festering sores because they have no bandages or medicines, bloated bellies from lack of food, hair turning yellow from malnutrition." Landau, who is originally from South Africa, said she was struck by the poverty and hopelessness that locked so many of the people of the West African nation into their dire circumstances. Especially when just a small sum of money, what we in this country would consider a pittance, might drastically improve lives. "We met several women who had been seamstresses but had turned to prostitution because they no longer had sewing machines," said Landau. "Something as simple as $30 for a basic machine would let them live totally different lives." NEEDS ARE BASIC Moore and Landau said they got involved with the group initially through a course in economic development at Mary Washington. Along with several others in the class, they listened as Darius Coulibaly--founder of the Fredericksburg-based group Empowering the Poor Inc.--outlined various problems faced by the people in the West African country where he grew up, Côte d'Ivoire. The idea, and the eventual reality, was that after seeking practical solutions to some of the problems rooted in poor health care and poverty, some students would actually go to Tonhon to try to implement those real-world solutions. Moore and Landau did that, though the malaria control project they began with eventually gave way to a larger effort to take a comprehensive look at the most basic needs of people in the village. Coulibaly, who teaches at Chancellor High School, accompanied the students. He said they came away believing that the most compelling needs were in education, basic health care and "micro-finance," loans of from $25 to $200.
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