Name: Marie Da Silva
Project: School Laboratory for Aids orphans
Position: Project Leader
Location: Malawi
Biography
Short summary of your background:
Born in Malawi, Marie Da Silva has been working as a nanny in the United States for the past fifteen years. She has been taking care of fourteen different children, and over the years, she has become an expert in child development and education.
In 2002, Marie Da Silva met the teachers and students of a small primary school housed in a nearby church, in her home village of Che Mboma in Africa. A year later, the church needed the space back and Marie's mother opened her family house to the school, so children could go on with their studies. In 2003, Marie visited her mother and realized many children in the village were left out of school, especially children orphaned by Aids. Marie decided to turn her family house into a free school for orphans, and since then, the number of children and classes has steadily increased.
For the past five years, Marie has been sending $1,000 a month to Malawi from the money she earns working as a nanny in the U.S, to pay all the teachers' wages. From 60 children in 2003, the school has grown to 230 students today, from ages 6 to 20. The children study in the original bedrooms and living room of the house; the kitchen is the headmaster's office and the garage is used as the Form 1 class (first year of secondary school).
In September 2005, Marie founded the Jacaranda Foundation with the hope of raising the awareness and funds needed to educate orphans in Malawi. Marie believes that caring for children and educating them will reduce the AIDS pandemic in Malawi.
Languages you can speak/write:
English & Chichewa
What inspired you to take this initiative?
My love for children, my work experience as a nanny and my personal history gave me the inspiration to educate and feed orphans and to raise awareness about their plight.
I have experienced firsthand the devastation caused by the Aids pandemic, I know what it feels like, to be an orphan. Fourteen members of my immediate family have died of AIDS: my father, two of my brothers and several of my nieces and nephews, leaving many children in our family orphaned.
When I visited Malawi in 2003 and I saw so many orphans were left out of school, I knew I had to do something. I decided to turn the suffering and pain I went through with all the deaths in my family, into something positive. Seeing orphans going back to school.
What is your (future) dream regarding this project?
My dream is to build and equip a full primary and secondary school for orphans in Malawi, equipped with a science laboratory and a library. The laboratory is essential to the project because without physical science in secondary school, students cannot pursue any scientific studies in Malawi (such as a nursing or medical degree).
My dream is to see orphans able to attend a proper school, graduate, go to university and become engineers, nurses, doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc.
My dream is to see a child who was left out school, go back to school thanks to the Jacaranda Foundation and blossom into a smart, healthy teenager willing to succeed and develop his or her country of Malawi.
My dream is to see orphans overcome the challenges of their daily life and become responsible, self-reliant and ambitious young adults.
What would you like to say to future participants in your project?
I would like to say to everybody willing to help us build the school laboratory, that the Jacaranda Foundation is a grassroots organization and that donations have an incredible impact. Donations directly reach the school in Malawi; they are entirely used to buy building materials and equipment for the laboratory. On our website’s results pages, you will actually see updated pictures of the building come out of the ground and grow until completion.
Thanks to your help, hundreds or orphaned children will learn biology and physical science and will have a chance to pursue scientific and medical studies, which is exactly what my country of Malawi needs: more graduates in the fields of medicine, engineering and research.
Malawi is one of the countries hardest hit by Aids; the Jacaranda school for orphans is an essential tool for raising awareness among young people; the science laboratory will actively contribute to this cause, but it will also turn teenagers into future nurses, doctors and engineers. Without the Jacaranda school, these teenagers would not be in school (secondary schools are not free in Malawi; only 10% of teenagers actually attend secondary school).