DEL.ICIO.USOak Grove Elementary students donate quarter-ton of pennies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
When it comes to charity, the kids at Oak Grove Elementary school in DeKalb County are heavy contributors.
Heavy, as in hundreds of pounds. They’ve donated at least a quarter-ton of pennies to help children in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Photo courtesy Central Asia Institute
Greg Mortenson (kneeling) with students in Sarhad village, Pamir mountains, NE Afghanistan. These are the first students to attend school in the region. It takes over 32 hours jeep driving time from Kabul over precarious mountain trails to reach here.
RICH ADDICKS / raddicks@ajc.com
Riley Hendrix, 6, a student at the Atlanta Montessori International School, holds up some of the pennies she and her classmates have collected for ‘Pennies for Peace,’ a fund-raising effort that helps fund a school-building effort in the remote regions of northern Pakistan.
“You should have seen this container,” said Oak Grove dad Martin Belson, a co-pilot of the school’s “Pennies for Peace” fund drive. “You couldn’t get four people to pick it up. It got so heavy they had to reinforce the table.”
Oak Grove is one of 3,200 schools to participate in the program, which was created by humanitarian Greg Mortenson, mountaineer and co-author of “Three Cups of Tea” (Penguin, $15), which has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for 103 weeks. Mortenson’s book details his quixotic quest to build a school in a remote village in the Karakoram mountains of northwestern Pakistan, starting in 1993, and the ensuing literacy campaign that has swept around the globe.
Mortenson, who will speak Wednesday at Agnes Scott College, built his first school for $12,000. Today his Central Asia Institute (CAI) has a budget of $3.5 million and 78 schools to its credit. He could have doubled that number, except he chooses to build the hard way: All his schools are in remote or violence-prone areas; all are paid for with donations (he accepts no government money); no village gets a school without offering land and plenty of sweat equity; and in a region where extremists have targeted girls’ schools for harassment, he focusses on educating girls.
(Extremists have burned or blown up 170 girls’ schools in Pakistan; in neighboring Afghanistan 10 Taliban were arrested last November for splashing acid on the faces of a group of schoolgirls.)
Courtney Hendrix, whose 6-year-old, Riley, has scooped up at least $50 worth of pennies for a program at the Atlanta Montessori International School, said the pennies program is an effective teaching device. “I like it because it’s a tangible thing.”
Raising money a penny at a time is also a cumbersome process. One of the early significant contributions, 62,340 pennies, came from schoolchildren in Wisconsin. Children collected 92 million pennies last year, said Mortenson, and he expects the program to quadruple this year.
An economist told Mortenson there is $90 billion in pennies under sofa cushions and in jelly jars around the country — just about the United Nations’ estimated cost of eliminating worldwide illiteracy.
But children have also donated their pennies to build soccer fields in South Africa and to tutor homeless children in Florida. “Kids are encouraged to find their own endeavor to support,” he said. The point, he says, is to show that from mustard-seed-sized beginnings, great things can grow.
“It teaches kids they can make a difference.”
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