After students fight through a tedious week of studying and finally finish their exams, many will have an equally daunting responsibility waiting for them when they get home: holiday gift-shopping.
But this year, there's another option for students who shudder at the thought of a shopping mall in December. Starting this week, the Yonso Project, a non-profit organization co-founded by senior Sonja Stefani, will be at the campus center offering holiday gift boxes that give money in a friend or family member's name toward educational development in the rural town of Yonso, Ghana.
Each box includes a note pledging the donation and picture of children from the town, where poverty and depression have strangled the rural economy. According to Stefani, even a small donation can make a difference.
"The exchange rate is one dollar to 10,000 [Ghanaian dollars], so if you donate $10 to the Yonso Project, that's 100,000 in Ghana," she said. "You give $10 and it's an incredible amount to them over there."
In Yonso, Stefani said, locals face a constant struggle in finding adequate resources for the local school, which needs supplies, teacher salaries and structural repairs. But by American standards, she said, the funds they need are modest.
"One of the things about the projects we do is that they're not very expensive," Steafani said. "I mean, it costs us $200 to sponsor the whole school to take a field trip. It's $150 to send a kid to school for a year."
Stefani began the Yonso Project last year with her high-school friend Nick Caccavo who had just returned from an abroad program in Ghana. While he was there, Caccavo met a Ghanaian student named Kwabena Danso who was in charge of the Yonso Students Union, a small group of college students from Yonso who had organized the building of a new library there.
After hearing about the organization from Danso, Caccavo visited Yonso to see for himself.
"[The library] was a brand new building, relatively small, and it was a rural area so that made sense," Caccavo said, "but it was almost completely empty. They had a couple tables and chairs, and a box of books ... the library probably had fewer books than the shelf above my bed."
When Caccavo returned, he told Stefani about his experiences, and the two Vermont natives decided they could do something to help.
"What Nick observed was that [the Yonso Students Union has] a lot of people to do a lot of volunteering," Stefani said. "They have a surplus of people to do work, but what they need is resources."
After planning and fundraising during the spring semester, Stefani and Caccavo went home over the summer and began a book drive hoping to fill the library in Yonso. According to Stefani, the organization snowballed from there.
"People were really responsive, and we ended up with 7,000 books. Over the summer we fundraised more to be able to send the books, and they just arrived there about a month ago," Stefani said, explaining that it was easy for them to become incorporated in Vermont, since the infrastructure had already been created.
"Since then, we've taken on several new projects," she said.
Among those projects are the funding of a new teachers' quarters, field trips, quiz competitions that reward motivated students and a budding pen pal program, which is run by Caccavo's younger brother, Tufts junior Anthony Caccavo, through a grant from the Tisch College's Civic Engagement Fund.
The pen pal program will connect students in Medford and Somerville to students in Ghana, the younger Caccavo explained.
"The students really wanted connections with American students here. I thought it was a good way to teach kids in America basic writing skills and how to write letters," he said. "We put together some basic forms that we had the students fill out, and we just received recently over 300 forms from Ghana."
"They were extremely excited," he added. "The Ghanaian students really responded to the project."
Stefani said the pen pals will provide a huge lift to the students in Yonso, who rarely leave Yonso and have little experience with Western culture.
"They love America, they love American things, they love Americans, and they just want to communicate as much as possible," Stefani said. "I think America represents a land of wealth and opportunity to them, and so they're fascinated by it."
According to Anthony Caccavo, the program will make an impact on students in Medford and Somerville as well.
"Ideally I hope that it broadens their global perspective and opens them up to new ideas," he said. "I think a lot of things that go on in the world today are due to cultural misunderstanding, and we're hoping that this in a way will help students at a younger age realize that while an ocean's a long distance, it doesn't mean that we're all different."
Stefani said that the gift boxes will help pay for a variety of projects like the pen pal program and will be a first step on the way to the organization's long-term goal of helping to create an ecotourism business in Yonso that will boost the town's economy in an environmentally-friendly way. If the fundraiser can reach the organization's goal of $8,000, she said, it would do wonders.
"That could pay for every single one of our programs for three years," she said. "This is our biggest fundraising push."
Stefani added that all of the profits will go directly into those programs, since the organization has no overhead costs. For students who are interested, she said, boxes are available at the campus center every day this week or online at www.yonsoproject.org.
"It's a great way to keep in mind the idea of giving this holiday season," Stefani said. "I can buy you this gift, but I can also be giving to somebody else at the same time."
