When I met Shawan Patterson Jackson at Mr. Chan’s restaurant on Reisterstown Road in Pikesville, I made sure I had the six boxes of pens.
Jackson is the president and chief executive officer of the Sheridan Patterson Center for Holistic Family Services, a 12-year-old nonprofit that places children in foster homes. That’s her full-time job. Every holiday season she takes part in the Giving Circle Shoebox Ministry that sends school supplies and toiletries to the village of Abira in Kumasi, Ghana.
Some of the foster children and their parents the Sheridan Patterson Center serves participate in the program. In late October Jackson sends out the word that toothbrushes, toothpaste, books, notebooks, pencils and erasers are needed for the drive.
And pens. The school supply items, so taken for granted by American students, are in short supply in Abira, Jackson told me. Students at that tiny Ghanaian village really appreciate the books. And the notebooks. And the pencils and erasers.
And, I’m willing to bet, especially the pens.
Jackson visited Abira in 2000. One of the things she noticed is that those Ghanaian students seemed to take education more seriously than American students.
“Our students see education as some sort of punishment,” Jackson told me over lunch. (She had a vegetarian dish; I’ll become a vegetarian about the same time I find I can scratch my left elbow with my left hand.) “In Africa it’s a different value system based on education.”
I don’t know about value systems, but I do know about my experience in another African country: The Sudan in 1996. I was working for the other daily newspaper in town. Editor John Carroll sent reporter Gil Lewthwaite and me to the Sudan to investigate reports of slavery.
We spent five days in southern Sudan, whose “black” inhabitants were then engaged in a 23-year-old civil war with the “Arabs” of the north. (The quotes around “Arabs” and “blacks” are justified. I soon learned that in Sudan, the “Arabs” looked just like me and most other black Americans.) Most of the time we were in a village called Nyamlel, where residents lived in mud huts called tukuls and where there was no indoor plumbing, no paved roads, no electricity and no streetlights.
One day I was walking back to my tent when a teen by the name of Gobir — I’ll never forget his name — stopped me.
“Excuse me,” he said, “do you have a pen?”
“A pen?” I repeated, not sure that I had heard him right. “You mean to write with?”
“Yes,” he replied. Gobir explained that the school in Nyamlel was closed for the moment; schools always closed when enemy “Arab” forces were near, which they were. But when they were open, Gobir told me, the supplies were limited. There were virtually no pens. Notebooks were virtually nonexistent.
I handed him a couple of pens I had with me. “Pilot,” Gobir said, looking at the brand name on the pens. I rummaged through a bag I had and pulled out a couple of notebooks and gave them to Gobir as well. The kid positively glowed.
I recalled that incident when Jackson sent out the call for people to donate school supplies to Abira. I had six boxes of pens in my home office that I didn’t really need. If those kids in Abira were anything like Gobir, then I knew just what to do with those pens. I’d give them to Jackson, who would know where to send them.
Due to my penchant for procrastination, my donation won’t get to Abira until the 2009 holiday season. After Jackson sends out the call in October, the foster children and their parents gather for a family night and hand in their donated items. They’re shipped in November to arrive in Abira by Christmas.
When Lewthwaite and I left Nyamlel, a man pleaded with us to send not only school supplies, but also books, magazines and any other reading material. I have a mess of magazines lying around I don’t really need.
I hope school kids in Abira like “Sports Illustrated,” “Entertainment Weekly,” “Mother Jones,” “Time” and “Vibe” magazine.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
