A presentation of the Point Dume Elementary School’s students’ fundraising program to help build a school in Central Asia will take place Tuesday at Diesel, A Bookstore.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
With single pennies they collect from piggy banks, donation cans and change dug from under couch cushions, Point Dume Elementary School students are slowly amassing enough pennies to build and staff a school in one of the poorest regions of the world.
It’s all part of the international Pennies for Peace program that Point Dume fourth- and fifth-graders are participating in. They will offer a presentation of the program highlighting their efforts at Diesel, A Bookstore on April 27.
“Our society sees pennies as disposable and unimportant,” parent coordinator Ali Thonson said. “Yet, in some places, a penny can buy a pencil, and a hundred pennies can buy a teacher’s salary for a day.”
Established in 1994, Pennies for Peace is a part of the Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit mission designed to provide community-based education, especially to girls, in remote mountain villages of Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries.
American mountaineer Greg Mortenson launched CAI after climbing Pakistan’s K2. While recovering in a local village, he noted that the children drew with sticks in the sand, and he promised to help build them a school. Thus, Pennies for Peace was born.
Christiane Leitinger, director of Pennies for Peace, said lack of educational opportunities for children in these regions perpetuates lifelong ignorance and binds people to poverty.
“In one village, a girl asked Greg to help her find better education, even though kids there threw rocks at her,” Leitinger said. “They couldn’t understand why a girl would want schooling. Well, this girl went on to get a degree in maternal health and, after she returned to her village, childbirth mortality disappeared.”
“It takes very little to bring education to these areas,” Thonson said. “Fifteen thousand dollars builds a school, and a dollar a day pays a teacher. The program is designed to pay for itself through pennies collected in our community. You find discarded pennies everywhere.”
Leitinger spoke to the Point Dume students in November and they were inspired enough to vote overwhelmingly to participate in the program. Since November, they have collected 842,653 pennies and are more than half way to their goal of building a school in a country many children know only from hearing mention on TV news reports.
“It’s crazy that kids can’t go to school,” 10-year-old Eden Ettenger said. “Girls should be educated. I didn’t know about these countries till I learned about them with Pennies for Peace. I would love to visit there and meet the kids and see the school we’re building.”
Fourth grader Grayson Cook said, “I voted for Pennies for Peace because kids there don’t have any school and we have a great school. I mean, we find pennies on the ground!”
Grayson was most affected by the paucity of books in Mongolian village libraries. “They only have 20 books in their whole library,” he said. “We have more books just in my classroom. I put a penny jar in the Malibu Snack Shop at the baseball field.”
Thonson said the Malibu community has been supportive of the children’s efforts, allowing them to place penny donation jars in shops and restaurants around town.
“This is enormously empowering for these kids,” Thonson said. “Not only does it show them the enormous impact a penny can make, it shows them what they can do as citizens of the world.”
Leitinger agreed.
“Pennies for Peace has two focal points: to help educate American children about a place in the world that is normally a blank on the map for them, and to teach them about their own power,” she said. “It’s about broadening cultural and personal horizons. One penny buying a pencil can end up transforming a community. It puts things in perspective.”
Since 1994, Pennies for Peace has built 64 schools, providing education for more than 25,000 children. The idea is that better education builds a bridge to a sense of greater global community and opens the door to greater dialogue for peace.
“It’s a chance for kids to understand a value of philanthropy that is more involving personally,” Leitinger said. “It’s not just, ‘take this,’ but ‘what do you need?'”
Kris Jennings teaches 4th grade at Point Dume and directs the Community Service Commissions there.
“I’ve never seen a group of kids so passionate about a community service project,” she said. “They give up their lunches to work on this. Because it’s about schools, it’s so connected to their experience. We made a presentation to the City Council and now, it’s become more of a whole community effort.”
Natalie Aldrich, 10, said she would like to give notebook [computers], MacBooks and a white board to the effort. “Our goal is to collect one and a half million pennies to build a school,” she said. “We’re half way there.”
The Pennies for Peace presentation takes place at Diesel, April 27, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. A video presentation will take place and students in the program will read from Greg Mortenson’s book, “Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.” More information on the Pennies for Peace Program can be found online at www.penniesforpeace.org