Three Wartburg College students will carry out service projects around the world during the summer of 2021 with help from $10,000 grants from the Davis Projects for Peace program.
Junior Mildred Mahatlane will partner with the headmaster and counselor at Mafhikana Primary School in Botswana, where she attended primary school, to construct a new classroom that will serve kindergartners, who are only granted space in the current school for two months out of the year.
Sophomore Shanta Nagarkoti will return to Nepal, where she will construct a washroom and hand-washing station as well as a water filtration system to provide clean drinking water for a school in Lamjung district. The area was hit by a disastrous earthquake five years ago and has yet to fully recover.
Junior Mercy Umba of South Sudan was originally awarded the grant in 2020, but the project was deferred because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She will partner with Kajo Keji Health Training Institute, a Ugandan organization working with refugee communities in the region. KKHTI will lead training for up to 80 primary health care providers and offer community sensitization on mental health care issues. The project also will include an economic empowerment program that will help address the financial stress and severe poverty in the refugee communities. Umba is being mentored by Collins Kalyebi, a 2020 Wartburg graduate who received a Davis grant in 2018.
Philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis founded Davis Projects for Peace in 2007 to celebrate her 100th birthday. Davis, who died in 2013, committed $1 million annually to fund 100 grassroots efforts by college students. Wartburg students have received a grant every year since the program’s inception. Though Projects for Peace invites all undergraduates at the American colleges and universities that are partners in the Davis United World College Scholars Program to compete for these grants, Wartburg’s three recipients all attended a United World College school.
“Competition is keen and we congratulate those students whose projects have been selected for funding in 2021,” said Philip O. Geier, co-founder and executive director of the Davis United World College Scholars Program that administers Projects for Peace. “We are pleased to once again help young people launch some initiatives that will bring new energy and ideas to improving the prospects for peace in the world.”
