Enjoy a Tour of the UDS Learning Center in Liberia

What an exciting week! Thursday, October 15, our little learning center was visited and utilized by 35 students of all ages representing different schools in the community. Students either participated in one of the study classes covering subjects like math andphonics or completed their daily homework assignments. This post will give you a tour of our learning center that started with a few donated library books and microscope. Please enjoy a cup of coffee or tea as we warm your heart with these captivating photos of Liberia's studious young boys, girls, men and women taking full advantage of our facility. These beautiful photos were taken by our fabulous volunteer RodneyJohnson.

Welcome to the Uniting Distant Stars Learning Center Pictorial Tour!

We will start our tour on the porch where we hold our Backpacks for Peace training. Here you will find one young boy focused intently on hishomework while a few students behind him attend a study class run by one of our youth leaders.

Now as you enter through the front door, you will find students sitting on a sofa along the left side of the room doing their homework.

This view is along the same wall, but looking towards the front door. Each student finds their particular space to work on homework. There is a constant flow of young people coming to the center after school. If you look toward the front door, you will find another study group run by a second youth leader.

Here is one happy little boy enjoying the books he selected from the library. Behind him is another view of the study class by the front door with students of varying ages.

Let's stop and say Hi to Rodney, who was busy posting these photos on his Facebook page. He is our IT guy, who has fixed one of three desktopcomputers donated early this year by Agnes Fallah Kamara, founder of the Straight From the Heart Center. We hope he can get the other two working, so he can start teaching the highly demanded basic computingskills class in our center.

Kelvin Fomba, UDS Co-Founder and Country Director, is helping these four young boys with their homework. Kelvin wears many hats with UDS from training auto mechanics to conducting study classes with our younger students.

This larger room might look familiar to you. This iswhere we hosted the Google Hangout with 50 Liberian youth for the Nobel Peace Prize Youth Forum at Augsburg College in Minnesota this past March. Thewhite sheet on the wall is the projection screen for showing inspirational videos like the one created and published (click here)by our amazing youth leader volunteer Anna in Minnesota. Now let's enter though the door at the left of the screen to complete our tour.

As you step into this room, you will see it contains the library filled with books and the microscope, and also serves as a small classroom.Kelvin and a third youth leader are teaching a study class to another eager group of students.

As you turn to the other side of the room, you will find two youth scanning the bookshelves of the library while other students are busy with their homework at the table. This photo is priceless, because it shows how invaluable a library is to our students regardless of its size. We are extremely grateful to provide such a service for Liberia's aspiring youth.

We hope you enjoyed the tour of our learning center and thank you for taking the time to view each photo and caption. Uniting Distant Stars is dedicated to the education of Liberia's young people and this learning center is important part of our mission.

If you are interested in doing more to help improve this center for our youth in Liberia, there are many ways you can support this initiative.

• Donate by credit card by clicking the button below

• or by check at:

Uniting Distant Stars

4010 Lawndale LN N

Plymouth, MN 55446

• Select Uniting Distant Stars as part of company's annual United Way Campaign. One of our sustaining supporters, an employee of the University of Minnesota, added UDS to their annual giving last year and is doing it again this year.

• Utilize your company's Employee Match program. Another sustaining supporter has been utilizing their company's program since 2014.

• Shop at AmazonSmile and 0.5% of your purchase price will be donated to Uniting Distant Stars.

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• Help us ship the remaining boxes of reading textbooks and library books that have been waiting to reach the hands of students in Liberia. The photosbelow were taken in 2012 after we had received the donated textbooks from St. Vincent de Paul School in Brooklyn Park by my cousin, a teacher at the school. We have shipped nine boxes of textbooks with our annual school supply drives in 2012, 2013 and 2014. We acquired three more boxes of library books late last year. We currently have 22 boxes to ship and the price per box was $75 (this includes clearing charges)based on IBXpress shipping costs from 2014. The total cost to ship the 22 boxes is roughly $1,650. Although IBXpress did finally deliver our 2014 shipment of school supplies on August 6, 2015, we have not receivedany communication that they are back in operation. So, we are looking for other alternatives for shipping companies and means to reduce or eliminate the cost with our 501(c)3 status.

  

We welcome your support, encouragement, and ideas to help us improve the quality of education for students in Liberia. Please share this post with others, who can help us achieve our goals.

Thank you again for your continued dedication, generosity and kindness in uplifting Liberia's bright young stars!!!