Ninth Annual Ames High School Trip to Uganda Planned for 2012

When Tim Mooney began teaching social studies courses at in 2001, about 70 students took an annual summer trip to Europe. They photographed castles and cathedrals and experienced European culture.

Mooney, who once served as a missionary in Africa, wondered if students might also be interested in traveling to a place unlike any they'd ever been: one of the poorest nations in Africa.

He called for a meeting in 2003 thinking that seven interested kids would be a success. About 100 people, 33 kids and 66 parents, filled the room where the social studies teacher suggested that students build a school for children in Uganda during the summer of 2004. 

But he also warned them.

Mooney told the group that they would mix cement in the sun, eat rice and beans for every meal and sleep on the ground. They would get sick, he said, probably with diarrhea and possibly with malaria and might even die in car crash.

“I didn’t want them to think it was going to be a vacation,” Mooney said.

At the end of the meeting a doctor walked up to Mooney and handed him a check for $7,500 and said he would give more if Mooney needed it.

“The response has been like that the last eight years,” Mooney said.

Student applications for this summer's school building project are due Nov. 2, but the fundraising — it takes $30,000 each year — has already begun. Students from an Ames High School club, Students Helping to Eliminate Poverty and Hunger, (SHEPH), are helping organize Abana Banji, a 5K run and 1 mile fun run at Ada Hayden Park 9 a.m. Saturday. The run generates about $4,000. It's one of many fundraising events to come.

Each student who wants to take the trip needs to raise $4,000 a piece. Donations to students are tax deductible because the money goes to a non-profit called Global Building Group that Mooney created specifically for the building projects.

Mooney picks a new area of Uganda to build in each year. Students typically work with Ugandan brick layers and build school buildings, consisting of a cement floor, brick walls and a metal roof. School buildings are going up benefiting Ugandan children, but the Ames students are affected the most. Many students haven't seen a rough part of the U.S., let alone the most impoverished parts of the world, Mooney said.

“Africa is the poorest place on earth,” he said.

One of the first things Mooney said he noticed was the number of barefoot people in Africa. Many don't own a pair of shoes. Crippled people crawl up to them with their hands outstretched saying they are hungry. Schools meet under trees, Mooney said.

“Seeing that blows students' whole worldview,” he said.