Donor goes to Africa and finds Seeing is Believing

December 15, 2008 By Laura Drake, The Edmonton Journal

 

EDMONTON - In the photo he has up on one of his two computer screens, Michael Mravinec is sitting at a table in Addis Ababa surrounded by a bunch of high-school locals. They all have a book in front of them -- and grins from ear to ear.

It's just one of the 1,500 pictures he took during his trip to Ethiopia last month as part of the Canadian Organization for Development through Education Seeing is Believing program.

For the last 10 years or so, Mravinec has donated money to CODE, which supplies books and learning materials to developing countries.

"CODE is my favourite charity, since teaching people to read and write is the foundation of all learning," Mravinec said Sunday of the organization, which runs literacy programs throughout Africa and the Caribbean.

"If you contrast it to other charities who maybe just give handouts -- if you teach someone to learn, you're teaching them to learn for a lifetime. You're teaching them to help themselves."

However, for the last decade, this was little more than an abstract concept that motivated Mravinec's charity. Now, he has actually seen where his money went -- which is exactly why the program was created.

CODE recently started Seeing is Believing so that long-term donors could get a chance to see their charity in action, said CODE director Ann Speak, who led Mravinec's tour. "If you donate to a local hospital you may very well one day use that hospital."

"You have to take a big leap of faith that your money is going to be used properly on the other side of the world."

Mravinec was invited to go to Ethiopia from Nov. 7 to 21 on the second-ever Seeing is Believing tour with about nine other CODE donors. At first, he said he wasn't sure about taking the trip, since it didn't involve actually doing work in the country, simply observing what had already been done. "But then I thought, maybe it's presumptuous to assume they need us to do work for them."

Furthermore, the opportunity to travel to Ethiopia doesn't come along very often. So the 42-year-old computer programmer agreed to pay the roughly $5,000 cost, which included all of his expenses, as well as an additional donation to CODE, and headed off to Africa for the first time in his life.

"There's a great thirst for knowledge there. You can see it in the children's faces when you go to the reading rooms," Mravinec said.

While the Ethiopian government has recently invested strongly in schools, there are still few resources to support those schools, he added. CODE's reading rooms provide some of the books and resources that might not be found in the classroom. Many of the people Mravinec spoke to in the reading rooms asked for more chemistry and physics books.
The two-week CODE tour included visits to five of the reading rooms the organization has helped to set up in Ethiopia.

The rooms, which function similarly to libraries, vary in size and are stocked with books provided by CODE. The organization also provides librarian and teacher training and publishes books in local languages.

The organization has developed more than 1,000 unique books written, illustrated and published in 45 African countries.

"We believe that when a child learns to read or write, the child can do anything," Speak said.

Mravinec said it never once crossed his mind that his charitable donations might have led to an international voyage, but he's glad it did.

"It really opened my eyes to the work they're doing."

Photo by Greg Southam, The Edmonton Journal