Here is an article that appeared in the newspaper today with a snippet about our trip to Paris!
ASD students go globe-trotting for ‘community service’
TRIBUNE NEWS NETWORK
Monday, April 9, 2012
DOHA MORE than 80 students and faculty members of the American School of Doha (ASD) travelled abroad during their recent spring break.
This was part of the school’s community service programme and mission to encourage students to become “positive, active global citizens”.
The ASD International Service Trip (Humanitarian Strand) took around 50 students and teachers to the Kilimanjaro district of Tanzania.
The group, led by ASD teachers Chi-Yan Shang, Leon Chung, Kevin Sage, Amy Simpson, Diane Caristo and ASD Director of Development and External Relations Dr Phillip Stroup, worked at Mkombozi School to build and donate 40 classroom desks, finish the renovation of two classrooms in addition to plastering and laying the floor for a third classroom.
The group also worked on a perimeter fence that will keep wild animals off the school compound. Following this, students visited the famed Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area.
The ASD’s association with the Mkombozi School, which is dedicated to providing quality education to orphans, began in 2010 when ASD’s International Award Expedition (Mt Kilimanjaro Ascent) under the leadership of Bill Casher, donated a school block to Mkombozi.
The project is unique in that each subsequent visiting school continues to add to the Mkombozi School complex, each contributing a tile to the mosaic of the project.
This grassroots development project is coordinated by International Travel for Schools, the outfitter for most of ASD’s international service trips, and safari outfitters’ Big Expeditions in Arusha.
Numerous school, art and sports materials were also donated to the school to help bolster both the academic and extra-curricular life at the school which many of the orphaned students call home. “Each group that comes to Mkombozi picks up from where one school left off, adds something of our own and then passes it off to another school to carry on with the project,” said Shang.
ASD’s International Service Trips focus either on humanitarian or on environment conservation. Next year’s trips will take the ASD team to several countries including the Maldives to research on whale sharks, Mozambique to continue supporting an ASD-sponsored rural school, South Africa to work at the Thanda Game Reserve to help census predators, and Sichuan in China to work on a humanitarian project with a school in collaboration with Honeywell China in the 2008 Earthquake Zone.
ASD’s cultural trips also took students to Spain and Morocco under the leadership of ASD’s Spanish teacher Nancy Hendrix and David Carlson. Twelve students spent the week evaluating the Muslim influence on southern Spain and learned about the links between Iberia and North Africa in addition to getting some Spanish language immersion.
ASD students also visited Paris under the leadership of French teacher Sylvie Esrawee, Pat Desbarats and Katie Houston for the second year in a row. Twenty students spent the week experiencing Paris and learning the ins and outs of French culture through the nuances of its language.
