Students Collect Pennies to Aid African Village

BY COURTNEY GAILLARD

THE CHRONICLE

Students at Paisley Magnet School are hoping that their pennies will buy enough food and supplies for a village of 700 people in West Africa.  Students kicked off a Penny Campaign last week to raise money to buy food and supplies for a village in Mauritania, located in West Africa.

Robb Warfield, coordinator of magnet schools, will travel to the region next month, and every penny from the campaign will go toward buying food and other supplies to sustain the village for the next year. This will be Warfield’s second trip to Mauritania.  He first spent time in the country in 1997 as a Peace Corps Worker. Warfield lived with a family of eight for two years.  Warfield and his wife and one other person, from his church, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, will be journeying back to Mauritania for a 10-day stay with the task of supplying the village with food and supplies. Mauritania is amid its worst famine in 15 years and close to 1 million people are facing starvation in a country where summer temperatures will reach 130 degrees.  Grass seeds along the river are harvested for nourishment and stray cats are eaten as well by the people.

At an assembly that launched the Penney Campaign, Warfield spoke to the Paisley student body and told them that “poverty and famine occur in a context that we’re so far removed from. We’re in a country that takes (poverty) for granted, and we don’t have a sense of entitlement.  We don’t realize how much we have.” Mauritania, the last country to declare slavery illegal in 1980, is located below Morocco and above Senegal.  Warfield explained that it’s a huge country equal to the size of Texas and California combined.  To provide the middle school students a better perspective of the expansive country, he asked them to imagine a country that is a s big as Virginia and both of the Carolinas combined but with just one road on which to travel.

During his stay in an impoverished village, Warfield said he witnessed and endured, malnutrition and hunger on a regular basis.  Nursing mothers often became unable to produce milk for their babies.  Warfield became so concerned that he took his Peace Corps salary and bought as much powdered milk as he could to give to mothers so that they might be able to breast-feed their newborns. “They do have hardships that we can’t even relate to, but despite those hardships, there are also things we should envy about the way they live.  They are some of the most generous people in the world,” said Warfield, who, upon losing over 20 pounds due to lack of food in the village, was given an $18 donation that his host family has raised for him to buy some food.  Warfield was thankful but declined the money because he felt the family needed it more than he did.

Already $12,000 has been raised for food an supplies to be taken to West Africa, and Warfield says his original goal was to raise only $10,000.  Now Warfield is hoping to raise $40,000 after getting word that a refugee village, located in the vicinity of his home village, is in dire need of food as well. Many of the village people are still coping with their recent freedom, and many are still forced to pay their former masters a portion of what little money they earn.  The average woman, says Warfield, makes $80 to $100 dollars a year to feed an entire family.

“Most of the people had never seen anyone as white as me, and some of the children began crying and running away from me because they thought I was a ghost,” Warfield said.

Warfield hopes to make contact with an African-American church in the area to recruit people of color who might be interested in making the trip with him in order “to present a diverse front.”  He believes bringing together former slave descendants from America with recently released slave from West Africa would do wonders for their morale.