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A plan by three ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College students to offer Tanzanian street children a survival alternative to a pervasive sex-for-food trade has won a $10,000 award from the 100 Projects for Peace program.<\/p>\n
ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was one of 85 colleges and universities across the nation whose students submitted proposals to 100 Projects for Peace, a program that is now in its second year and was established by philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/home.bates.edu\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\"){kind=spacer}
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Titled “Food for Peace: Breaking the Hunger-Violence-Hunger Cycle,” the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ proposal is based on the creation of a community garden in the Tanzanian city of Mwanza. The facility will provide street children with employment, food and practical skills. In addition, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students will mount a local HIV\/AIDS awareness campaign that will include the production of a documentary about the garden. Finally, during the next academic year they plan to hold a peace conference at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ relating the project to local needs and activities.<\/p>\n
The three are Lauren Pluchino, a senior sociology major and anthropology minor from Horseheads, N.Y.; Emmanuel Drabo, a senior economics and mathematics major from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Chomba Kaluba, a sophomore from Mpika, Zambia, also majoring in sociology and anthropology.<\/p>\n
They conceived the project in partnership with the Mwanza-based non-governmental organization Foundation for the New Life of Street Children (FONELISCO). They will establish the garden at FONELISCO this summer, and Pluchino will remain there for at least a year.<\/p>\n
What makes this a project for peace? “We’re going on the premise that hunger leads to violence and that violence in turn leads to hunger,” Drabo explains. In a place where poverty and HIV-AIDS are endemic and opportunities to get ahead scarce, “we think we can break that cycle if we can just reduce the incentives to engage in sex for food.”<\/p>\n
The project builds upon Pluchino’s senior thesis, which examines the sex-for-food trade and which was inspired by a summer of research in Tanzania funded by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant called a Phillips Fellowship.<\/p>\n
She found that while street boys were able to survive in the city by begging, street girls often sell their bodies for food. Urban agricultural programs are seen as a promising approach to providing the girls with both food and food-production skills that would reduce the reliance on prostitution.<\/p>\n
Ideally, says Kaluba, “we’ll empower the children, they’ll be able to get food, buy clothes, go to school. Once they’re educated, they’ll inspire others in the community.”<\/p>\n
The three will plant the garden at the FONELISCO site, in a neighborhood near Lake Victoria. Joseph Elias, head of the NGO, was interested in the concept but had neither funds nor the people to take it on. That’s where the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ trio came in. “When we told him we got the grant,” Pluchino says, “he was shouting on the phone — ‘This is so exciting.’<\/p>\n
This is the second proposal by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students to be named one of the 100 Projects for Peace. Supported by the program, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Students for Peace in Rwanda last year assisted the Gitagata Rehabilitation Center, a state facility for street children in Bugasera, located in a region of Rwanda hit especially hard by the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.<\/p>\n
The 10 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students in the group came together through “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda,” a course taught by Assistant Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth. Dauge-Roth had his students strike up correspondences with Rwandans as a way of learning about the genocide on a personal level.<\/p>\n
The 101-year-old Kathryn Wasserman Davis is the mother of Shelby Davis, whose United World College Scholars Program spends more than $20 million annually bringing international students to American campuses including ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Read more about the program<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n