Two second-year students have obtained a GoMAD grant in 2021
GoMAD – “Go Make a Difference” – grants are a UWCx initiative that for twenty years now has been supporting students across all UWCs in their endeavours to have an impact on an issue they feel strongly about in order to put UWC values into action.
This year, the travelling restrictions in connection pandemic have impacted on the way in which projects are implemented – with projects mostly implemented by individual students in their home country, while previously groups of UWCers used to meet and collaborate. Still, GoMAD projects have not failed to provide UWC students with an opportunity to spend their vacations putting the UWC values into action and challenging themselves as changemakers. The three students who will be implementing their GoMAD projects this summer are Ibrahim, Azeez and Elisa.
Ibrahim Kondeh was born in Kangama village, Sierra Leone. He arrived in Italy four years ago as an unaccompanied minor and lived in refugee camps until 2019 when he passed the Italian UWC selections and obtained a Never Alone scholarship to attend UWC Adriatic.
Even before UWC, Ibrahim was involved in advocacy for less fortunate people, particularly unaccompanied migrant children and refugees and asylum-seekers living in Italy. As he was going through his second year at UWC Adriatic, he acutely felt the need do something to bring about change to the people he had left back home: “All of a sudden, in Duino I realized that the problems our communities are facing cannot be solved if we run away from them. Change is possible only if someone is willing to work for it”.
Ibrahim applied for a GoMAD grant and submitted a project to be implemented in his home country in the Village of Kangama in the Nimiya chiefdom. This is a remote mining and farming area where approximately 60% of the total population is made up by children between 1 and 15 years of age, only half of whom have the possibility to get a primary education. Keenly aware of the importance of education Ibrahim has identified two key issues that need to be addressed in his village’s only primary school in order to attract more children and promote a healthy educational environment. The first is to provide the school with toilets, the lack of which is the cause for spreading deceases such as cholera and malaria. The second is the lack of drinking water, which is the main reason why many children cannot attend the school in the first place, as they are tasked with walking long distances every day in search of drinking water for their household.
Ibrahim’s project will benefit over 150 pupils and their families in Kangama and in the surrounding villages. He cannot wait to get started and his dream is that this may be just the first of a series of initiatives he can get started back at home.
Azeez comes from Sinjar, Iraq, and is a member of the Êzidi minority in that city. Throughout his two years at UWC Adriatic he has been actively involved in projects aiming to assist his people back home. Azeez has obtained a GoMAD grant for a project that will bring the first children’s library to his home town.
“Education”, says Azeez, “helps people think, feel, and behave in a way that contributes to their success, and improves not just their personal wellbeing but also that of their community”. In particular, Azeez explains, since the ISIS attack on Sinjar, access to education has become a crucial issue and one that has been neglected in order to provide for basic emergency relief.
The library Azeez is planning to open will be located in the premises of a local organisation (“The future of Senabil”) and will be open every day of the week. Moreover, this organisation deals with language courses and other forms of support to education, so the children will benefit from several educational opportunities alongside the availability of books. In writing the project Azeez partnered with his first-year from Portugal, Zina, who will also be supporting him remotely in this endeavours.
