Karim, AVN Mason

Levi already wrote about how we passed our first 10,000 hit mark, at the Do Some Good Now page.   (We are getting ready to launch the awesome new version of Do Some Good Now that Chinua is working on, so be watching the site.)

I just wanted to write a little again, about this thing of training masons.

With the money that we will now send to AVN, a young man will be taught skills that will shape the rest of his life.  He will learn the techniques used to create the vaulted roofs that will shelter many people.  In his small country, he will become an experienced artisan, someone who will be able to teach others.  He will have a regular income.  He will have the opportunity to become an entrepreneur, if he so chooses.  He may travel with other masons to Mali, or Côte D’Ivoire, to train masons and build houses there.

I met Karim, pictured above, while I was in Burkina Faso.  Like a lot of the other masons, he was a little shy about having his photo taken, but like the others, he laughed with delight when he saw the result on the LCD screen on the back of my camera.  I don’t know if Karim owns a single photograph of himself.  He may never have used a computer.  In a country as impoverished as Burkina Faso, Karim didn’t have too many prospects for his future before the opportunity to train as a mason with AVN came his way.

Karim works with mud to make the bricks that form the vaults.  He laughs with the other masons as they tease each other while they work.  He comes back to the kiosk at the end of the day for some water or a soda.   He knows what his tomorrow is.

I saw many young men on the side of the road, in Burkina Faso, trying to sell phone cards by thrusting them into our car windows frantically.  Able bodied young men, with no prospects.  I thoroughly love what the Association La Voûte Nubienne is doing, by taking men like these and training them, creating a whole new market for them to thrive in, taking unemployed people and giving them a trade.

I want to encourage you.  We have reached the goal to train one person.  Whoever that person is, he is very important, and his life will be transformed.  This is no small thing.

Now let’s do it again.  And again and again.  And again.