Tag: Africans giving back

Giving Back, People

Samuel Quarcoo | This man is a waiter at a Md. country club. He also helps support thousands of students in Ghana, his home country.

By Cathy Free | Washington Post

Samuel Quarcoo’s crusade started by happenstance in 1999, when a third-grade teacher asked him to visit her class and give a presentation about Ghana, his African homeland. Quarcoo, who lives in Rockville, Md., was then a math teacher at Wheaton Woods Elementary School in Montgomery County. He showed the kids some photos of his old neighborhood school in Ghana and explained that the students often did not have basic supplies such as pencils and notebooks.

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Giving Back

US-based Ghanaian community association donates to Nandom Hospital, in Ghana

By Severious Kale-Dery | Graphic Online

A Ghanaian community association in America, The Nandome Dagara Biir Association of North America (ANANDA) has donated a 40-footer container load of assorted medical equipment, hospital consumables and personal protective equipment (PPE) to the St Theresa’s Hospital at Nandom in the Upper West Region of Ghana. The donation was made in collaboration with some donor partners.

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Giving Back

Liberians in America Donate Supplies to Jallah Lone Medical Center to combat Covid

By Arthur F. Beare

Amid numerous challenges facing the health sector of Liberia as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the Jallah Lone Medical Center in Bopolu, Gbarpolu County has benefited from a huge consignment of food and Non-food items. The gesture, which is worth about US$2,000 was made possible through the kind courtesy of the ‘Gbarpolu County Association in the Americas’ headed by Teaker Harris and its Project Management Committee Chairman, Dr. Samuel Harris.

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People

Minnesota teen beats the odds, dreams of building a school in her native Ethiopia

By GAIL ROSENBLUM

Zubeda Chaffe, 18, is a typical high school senior in many ways. She played soccer, basketball and ran track, participates in City Wide Student Council and works at the Hennepin County Library with the Teen Tech Squad. But those examples belie the extraordinary effort required of Chaffe to get to this point. At 7, she and her Oromo family fled Ethiopia fearing for their lives. She started school knowing only her name in English. On March 19, Chaffe will be one of five honorees at the 28th Children’s Defense Fund-MN Beat the Odds celebration. A full-time PSEO student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, she shares childhood memories, her take on American kids and her goals after college.

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Giving Back

Ghanaian Yale University Student and Social Entrepreneur Receives Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award

By Denise Meyer

When Shadrack Frimpong was awarded a President’s Engagement Prize from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, the 23-year old thought he was putting his life on hold. Armed with a three-year, $150,000 grant, he, instead, found his life’s purpose. 

Shadrack returned to his native village, Tarkwa Breman, a remote cocoa-growing community in western Ghana. There, his vision to open a school and medical clinic with the farmers as active participants in the financing and operation has been a notable success.

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Giving Back, People

Meet Dr. Wale Suleiman, the Neurosurgeon in New Orleans, who returns to Nigeria to treat patients for free

By Tanasia Kenney

As if the life of a neurosurgeon isn’t busy enough, one dedicated doctor manages to split his time between New Orleans — and Nigeria. Dr. Wale Sulaiman, a neurosurgeon at Ochsner Hospital, finds himself on a plane each month bouncing between two continents, local station WWL-TV reported. While in Nigeria, he performs life-saving surgeries for free.

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Giving Back

Canada-based Ghanaian donates ambulance to hospital at Drobo

A Ghanaian Chartered Accountant based in Toronto, Canada, Mr Ohene Amoako, has presented an ambulance worth US$30,000.00 to the 152-bed Saint Mary’s Hospital at Drobo in the Jaman South Municipality in the Bono Region.

The ambulance will be used to convey patients who have been referred to other health facilities free of charge but the hospital has arranged that the patients will be charged GHC2.00 to be put in a pool to cater for the operational cost of the ambulance.

Presenting the vehicle to the hospital, a brother of the donor, Mr Gabriel Kyeremeh, explained that even though Mr Amoako considered a lot of options, it was finally agreed that the ambulance could help prevent avoidable deaths caused by the non-availability of an ambulance to convey referred patients to bigger health facilities.

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People

Somali native gives up American life for military service in his birth nation

It surfaced during his childhood in a typical American suburb setting replete with friends, video games and extracurricular sports.

It lingered in high school with a growing comprehension of his good fortune and a burgeoning understanding of world affairs.

It persisted as he entrenched himself in study at the University of Southern Maine and further gained a sense of what would give life purpose in his adult years.

African-born Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed had nurtured constant suppositions about his fate had his family not immigrated to this country from war-torn Somalia in 1990.

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Giving Back

Los Angelese FC forward Latif Blessing gives back to his Ghanaian village

For many Major League Soccer players, the offseason is a much-needed time to rest, travel and relax with family. But for Los Angeles FC forward Latif Blessing, the offseason was a time to focus on his greatest passion — using the sport of soccer to give back to his hometown.

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Policy

Bridging the gap: Africa’s science landscape and the African diaspora

As I headed home on the plane, my mind was abuzz. The engines steadily hummed in the background, dulled only by the even louder thoughts that raced through my mind. The plane lights were dim. Snores ebbed and flowed around me, my neighbors nothing but still heaps piled under blankets. Meanwhile, I sat wide awake, staring ahead into space, unable to settle down.

I was on my way back to the US after a 3-week span of conferences and research project work in East Africa. This exercise isn’t new to me, however. I am a penultimate example of the “reverse diaspora,” where a particular area of expertise (my academic research) which is focused in Kenya has landed me there for increasingly more frequent stints every year for the past several years. While I was born in America to Kenyan immigrant parents, I was raised in Kenya from a young age.

I went on to pursue secondary education in America, and now hold a faculty appointment at a US institution. In some shape or form, I knew that I’d return some day.

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