Guest post from Matt Vincent of Scottie’s Place.
We arrived at the Dukwi refugee camp on a blistering January afternoon, after a five-hour drive from Gaborone, Botswana’s capital. Months earlier, I had been asked to join Scottie’s Place Founder, Paul Winter, on a fact-finding mission to five refugee camps in Africa. Our goal was to better understand the educational challenges faced by girls living in the camps, and the ways in which Scottie’s Place could help. At that time, Scottie’s Place, a nonprofit organization based in West Virginia, was expanding its mission to empower and educate children affected by poverty in the US, to include vulnerable children from around the globe.
The Dukwi refugee camp is located in east-central Botswana, near the Zimbabwean border. Confined in this wholly unnatural environment are 4,000 people, whose nationalities represent nearly a dozen African countries. As we moved through the camp on that first day, the obvious poverty was in great contrast to the …