The Aku Project
The Aku Project was founded by John Edoga, someone who grew up in the village of Aku, and has now lived in the United States as a surgeon for more than the last 40 years. The African Youth Education and Community Development Foundation is building schools and making resources like water available in places that need them, and Aku is the site of its first project. We are hoping that as you find out about what we do, you will accept our invitation to become involved and support this work.
Aku is located in the Nsukka division of Enugu State, in Nigeria, about six hours south of the capital city of Abuja. Aku is inhabited by the third largest tribe in the country, the Igbos, who represent about 20 million people. Through the carbon dating of textiles, we can trace the historical roots of Aku back to the 9th century, ACE. In more recent history, from 1967 to 1970, Aku was occupied by federal troops during the Biafran War. At that time, at least a million people were killed, and nearly all of the homes in the region were destroyed. The war devastated Aku, and three and a half decades later, people are still picking up the pieces and rebuilding.
The village elders of Aku donated land to the foundation for the purpose of building a residential school complex, The Bernard O. Edoga Memorial School. The Sherifa Omade Edoga Library and Community Center has been funded by a generous gift from John and Delia Edoga. The next big undertaking entails developing an infrastructure (running water, sewage system, alternative energy sources, roads, etc.) that will impact Aku and its immediate environs. For that, we are asking for your help.
Merging Families: Bridging Continents: Giving Back
When he was eighteen, John Edoga left the village of Aku in Nigeria, flying across continents to take advantage of a scholarship to Columbia University. After that, he finished medical school at Columbia, becoming one of the finest vascular surgeons in the world. John left Aku, but the connections to his Aku family and the values instilled in him by his father, Bernard Oyigbo Edoga, stayed with him across the continents.
When John arrived in this country in 1963, more than four decades ago, he was matched with an adoptive family from Westport, Connecticut. Dr. Malcolm Beinfield was to be his American father, since he was already the surgeon that John wanted to become. John’s own father, Bernard Oyigbo Edoga, a dedicated teacher, had died at the age of 45 of a problem easily treated here—appendicitis. In John’s village, there were no doctors who could properly diagnose his father’s condition, and no hospital nearby at which a doctor could perform the surgery. Today, there is no adequate middle or high school in the village of Aku.
People are planning to change that. John and his wife, Delia Edoga, who live in New York, along with his mother, Rose Omade Edoga, who remains in Aku, founded the Aku Project. There is a parallel foundation in Nigeria that is working in concert with the American branch. Because it is family-based, there is dependability, accountability, mutual trust, top-notch communication, and an ease of efficiency. All work by the foundation is being done on a volunteer basis—so funds are dedicated to the projects themselves.
The Aku Project was developed to give children who remain in their home village some of the educational opportunities that John found when he came to America. Through providing access to safe water and learning, we hope to ensure and enable sustainable, community-led change. Already, the Aku elders have donated 100 acres of land for the construction of a school complex and community center. The school is named after Bernard Oyigbo Edoga, John's father, who died 50 years ago after having started 27 schools in the area, and served as Headmaster and an Education Leader in his region.
We plan to educate future leaders, enabling them to develop the skills to create better conditions for themselves and their country. The school will serve 360 enrolled students each year, and graduate 60 students annually through the standard Middle and High Schools. Countless others will benefit from equivalency, literacy, computer, and vocational job training programs. The school will function as a community resource and information center by providing a public library, athletic fields, a center for the arts, healthcare, and a hub for the creation of community itself. The Aku Project will enable an isolated population to reach into a larger world of opportunity.
The first building in the school complex, the Sherifa Omade Edoga Library and Community Center has been completed! It will not only touch the lives of generations of Aku community members to come, but it has already merged families and bridged continents during the dedication ceremony in December 2005.
During this visit, members of the Aku Project found that beyond the need for Aku’s educational development, it is startlingly clear that the first priority for its 100,000 residents, who walk between 3 and 7 miles each way to carry river water home, is water. This is what the residents of Aku told us that they most need and want--central sources of clean water. We believe that this project is essential to building an infrastructure that will not only provide wells for a clean, safe, proximate water source, but will also “trickle-up” to ensure a more healthy, productive and community-supported environment in Aku.
One of Bernard Oyigbo Edoga’s favorite sayings was, “Nothing happens unless somebody does something,” and another was, “If it happens around you, you are responsible for it.” It is in that spirit that we hope to fulfill our mission, first in Aku, and later in other sites.
