Armed with an extra backpack and a plane ticket in hand, Justin Karfo '09 will bring home more than just his clothes and laptop this summer.
The Burkina Faso native will also take students' leftover school supplies to children at the Primary School of Ziou in Nahouri.
"I [will] be giving [the supplies] to people who wouldn't have gone to school otherwise," Karfo said.
The Rotaract Club, an international service organization, is sponsoring a school supply drive to benefit Ziou's students.
Karfo said that going to school in the village can be hard for some children because of the expenses associated with school supplies.
The period between August and December is harvest time in the region, he said, and several factors, including a loss of manpower and the cost of additional school supplies, can be too much for some families to manage.
Many parents, Karfo said, "don't want [their children] to go to school" if it will mean not only lost income but also additional expenditures on school supplies.
In a country where the majority of the people rely on subsistence agriculture, 45 percent of the population lives under the poverty line.
Though Karfo grew up in the nearby capital city of Ouagadougou, he said he has a history of doing service work for students at Ziou. Students there range in age from 5 to 11.
The official language in Burkina Faso is French, so English-language textbooks and other books are not useful for Ziou's students.
But, Karfo said, writing utensils, binders, folders, calculators, backpacks, glue, rulers and paper are in demand. They will help make it possible for some students to attend school in the fall.
He plans to bring the collected supplies home with him in June. If there are too many items to carry, Rotaract will ship them.
As the academic year comes to a close, the drive's organizers are expecting most of the donations of leftover school supplies to come as students clean their rooms and prepare to move out.
"My friends have also given me stuff," Rotaract president Aditi Gupta '09 said. She is also a copy editor for The Daily Princetonian.
Students interested in donating supplies can drop their supplies off in boxes and a basket in the International Center resource room in Frist Campus Center through May 26.
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