Esther’s Echo was inspired by the community leaders and students that we have met during our travels both overseas in Africa and across Canada. We found leaders in impoverished regions of the world who had started projects from scratch to help out the people in their communities. For very small amounts of money, they were able to develop these projects into what we call community based organizations. These organizations come in many shapes and sizes. Some are orphanages for children affected by AIDS/HIV. Some are schools for students who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn. Some are shelters and rehabilitation centers for those addicted to narcotics. One woman in particular inspired us. Her name is Esther Kanu. Esther lives in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is located in West Africa and was the country depicted in the movie Blood Diamonds. The war shown in Blood Diamonds was real and took place between 1991 and 2002. During this time, many schools were destroyed, including an all-girls school where Esther taught. Many of these girls, with their education interrupted, had to live in the streets and take up work in the sex trade as their only source of food and money. Esther decided to take action and help these girls whose future had been destroyed by war and poverty. Although poor herself, and making less than 2 dollars a day, she ran fundraisers, braided hair, sewed clothing, and tutored English to raise enough money with some fellow teachers to start a new school. The community based organization she formed is called the Women in Action Vocational Training Center. It employs ten teachers in Sierra Leone and educates 40 girls, feeds them and keeps them off the street.
Esther is only one of thousands of leaders like her who have taken action to help those in their community. Yet despite all of the work by people like Esther, these leaders often have very little amounts of funding to run their organizations and in our travels we found they were often overlooked by large international development organizations. Esther’s school operates for less than 5000 dollars a year and we believed that we could raise the funds to help her. Through the University of Toronto, that was exactly what we did. We ran events on campus to raise money for Women in Action. But we wanted to do more, we wanted to help the other leaders like Esther who have developed incredible community based organizations but are working on their own and without a great deal of help. When we began to think about how we could help other local community leaders, Esther’s Echo was born.