The Power of a Few Good
Ideas
By Jan McCoy Ebbets
When they graduated from Smith College in May, Kirby Capen ’07 of Washington
D.C., and Neema Scott ’07 of Newton, Massachusetts, both had money in the bank
and Africa in their sights. Before long, they were roving in far-flung places, urban
and frontier, Capen in Ghana and Scott in Kenya.
Their travel was born of a mutual desire to make a contribution to peace-building
efforts throughout the world and demonstrate the power of a few good ideas. So the
two Smith graduates spent their summer executing their own public service projects,
with $10,000 in funding through the Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace
national competition.
Capen and Scott were among 100 undergraduates from 65 colleges and universities—including
Brown, Columbia, Harvard and Yale universities—who won the monetary awards
and traveled to more than 40 countries this summer to implement their ideas. Philanthropist
Kathryn Wasserman Davis established the Projects for Peace program in 2007 to encourage
and motivate college students to design grassroots projects that could be carried
out anywhere in the world during the summer and would contribute to fostering global
peace.
Neema Scott ’07, who worked in northern Kenya
this summer on her own public service project thanks to Projects for Peace, had a
Praxis internship with the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston prior to her senior year at
Smith. Photo by Edward Judice.
Capen, an engineering major with a minor in studio art, held individual beading workshops
for 9- to 14-year-old students from four schools in Ghana, including a school for
the deaf, as a starting point for discussions about identity, religion, differences
and similarities. She brought together students whose religious backgrounds were
Muslim, Christian and Jewish. She also offered computer workshops to the children—and
planned to donate one or more desktop computers to each of the three locations where
she worked—to encourage the communication among the young Ghanaians friends
whose relationships developed during her workshops. Fellow Smith graduate and classmate
Becca Berman ’06 joined Capen as a volunteer on the project for the first month.
“On my first trip to Ghana, as a high school exchange student, I was astonished at both the depth
of interest in and lack of awareness of religions, other than the two major religions in the country:
Islam and Christianity,” she wrote in her proposal. “Because Ghana has both a long tradition
of beads, dating to 15th-century trade beads, an active bead-making industry, and long-standing traditions
of wearing beads, beading activities could provide the entrée into discussing religious similarities
and differences in [a familiar] milieu.”
On the east coast of Africa, Scott, who majored in neuroscience, worked in northern
Kenya with a team of humanitarians who had agreed to help her teach inexpensive means
of obtaining access to water in drought-stricken territories. Her idea was to instruct
the local residents in the construction principles of manually drilling wells without
heavy, and expensive, machinery.
With the funds from her recent award, Scott set a goal of completing three wells
in the Turkana region and in the towns of Isiolo and Marsabit. She reported that
her efforts had been well received. One village gave Scott her own tribal name: Na
Langu (a Randille name meaning “girl from overseas”).
“The communities appreciate assistance, as well as the fact that I ask them for their help and
advice, which allows them to own the project instead of me owning it,” she wrote in an e-mail
from Kenya. “They are also confident that the water provided will help cease the fighting between
neighboring villages that has been going on for the past few decades over the water shortage.”
“Everyone asks why a neuroscience major is in Kenya building wells,” she wrote. “The
answer is: I had an idea of how to help people and decided that if I got the chance, that’s what
I’d do.” This summer she and Capen got their chances. |
