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Executive Director:
Cindy Nofziger, Seattle, WA
Board of Directors:
President - Bob Heavner, Ph.D.
Berkeley, CA
Vice President - Alusine Kamara,
Boston, MA
Secretary - Amadu Massally, Garland, TX
Treasurer - Dan Lavin, Seattle, WA
Members at Large:
Sarah Alsdorf, Seattle, WA
Jan Dyer, J.D., Seattle, WA
Christopher Thomas, Ph.D.,
Washington, DC
Michael Gibbons, Ph.D., Washington, DC
Advisory Board:
Ishmael Beah, author, New York, New York
Joseph Opala, anthropologist, authority: Sierra Leone culture and history, Harrisonburg, VA
Betsy Small Campbell, former Director of War Child USA and Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Peterborough, NH
Patsy Spier, Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Centennial, CO
Peggy Garber, Web Master and Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Seattle, WA
Jana Potter, Program Manager for Mercy Corps' Youth Internet Exchange Initiative and Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, Portland, OR
Ishmael Beah is a surviving child soldier from Sierra Leone. He recently authored the book "A Long Way Gone" about the war, and currently serves as the UNICEF Ambassador for Children affected by Armed Conflict.
Ishmael said recently that "one of the significant things that happened in my life after coming out of the war in my country, Sierra Leone, was being able to go to school again. Through schooling, I was able to begin reconnecting with my past before the war; a past that was filled with wonderful memories of songs recited in classrooms and reading texts aloud. Education has allowed me to rediscover some of my childhood happiness and to gather strength to continue living, as I can now hope for a future. This is why I truly support the work of Schools For Salone. There is no better way to empower the younger generation and their communities than providing them with education."
in 2008, Ishmael Beah sponsord a Schools for Salone project at Junctionla, in southern Sierra Leone near his home village of Mogbwemo.
Cindy Nofziger served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1985 -1987 working as a physical therapist at Masanga Leprosy Hospital. Executive Director, Schools for Salone. Cindy began Schools for Salone after returning to Sierra Leone in 2004 and was asked by former friends and colleagues at Masanga Hospital to help fill a desperate need in the country. She has 25 years of experience in health care, education, and project development. She holds graduate degrees in Physical Therapy from Boston University and Health Administration from the University of Washington, Seattle. Cindy also serves on the board of Friends of Sierra Leone (http://www.fosalone.org/).
Bob Heavner Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Berkeley CA. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1969-71 where he taught secondary school. Bob led non-profits in the San Francisco Bay area for many years. As a psychologist he specializes in work with traumasurvivors and victims of torture. Bob has initiated four separate school refurbishing projects at his former PeaceCorps school (Scarcies Secondary School Mambolo) and provides mental health consultation in Sierra Leone where he returns annually.
Alusine Kamara has worked extensively in Sierra Leone in the fields of nursing and public health for over twenty five years. He has served as a government official and liaison between officials and humanitarian organizations including the: Swedish Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, National Commission for Disarmament and Reintegration of Adult combatants. He has served as Secretary General of Sierra Leone Addiction Council, worked training teachers on both public and mental health issues with: CREPS (Complimentary Rapid Education Program for Schools) sponsored by UNICEF and The World Health Organization. Mr. Kamara was also Staff Nurse-in-charge at Hill Station Hospital in Freetown as well as the Director and Head Nurse of Benin Home, a rehabilitation center focusing on the reintegration of former child soldiers into civilian life following the ten year war inSierra Leone, where he became friends with Ishmael Beah.
Currently Mr. Kamara works on the Neurology floor of Massachusetts General Hospital. He lives in Boston with his family, including his wife Bamba, and four children.
Amadu Massally is a Sierra Leonean who resides in Dallas, TX. He is President of the Sierra Leone Network, a not-for-profit organization http://www.SierraLeoneNetwork.org/ and co-founder of the Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association, an organization that seeks to lead Sierra Leoneans to re-connect to their Sierra Leonean-American brothers and sisters, and vice versa, who are descendants of slaves brought from Bunce Island primarily, and other areas of the country. http://www.bunce-island.org/ Amadu is also very involved with the Sierra Leonean Diaspora through the Council of Representatives (CORE), which seeks to serve as an umbrella representation for the Diaspora.
Dan Lavin served as an Aquaculture Specialist for the Peace Corps, stationed in Makrugba and Makali (Sierra Leone) 1988-90. As a PCV, Dan focused his efforts on understanding failed attempts at development, and put those lessons to work to create fish ponds that are still in operation fifteen years later. Dan went to law school in Oregon, chef school in California, and studied finance in Seattle. He currently helps to coordinate C.I.P, and returns to Sierra Leone twice per year. Dan is an accountant with experience in non-profit finances.
Email: Dan.Lavin@Comcast.net
Sarah Alsdorf is a recently retired Seattle Public School teacher. She began her career teaching high school English in Connecticut. Parenting two sons sparked her interest in early childhood education, and for twenty years she taught third grade in Seattle. Sarah developed an interest in Sierra Leone because her husband Bob was a Peace Corps Volunteer there from 1967-69. Over the years the Alsdorfs have maintained ties with Sierra Leonean expatriates and students in the Seattle area, and Bob is currently working on legal reform and judicial education projects in Sierra Leone. Sarah received her B.A. in English from Carleton College in Northfield, MN, and her Master of Arts in Teaching from Yale University in New Haven, CT.
Christopher Thomas is Sector Manager for Human Development Programs, eastern and southern Africa of the World Bank. In this capacity he supervises a team of specialists that provide analytical and advisory services, technical assistance, and financing for education, health and social welfare programs throughout the region. Mr. Thomas has also worked on World Bank financed education development programs in southern Asia and northern Africa. Prior to joining the World Bank, he served as a consultant to the US government and the UN, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone. Mr. Thomas holds an M.A. in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University.
Jan Dyer is a private practice, family law attorney in Seattle Washington. She attended law school in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she acquired a solid knowledge of Civil law as used in the US, Canada, the UK and many former British colonial countries. She spent 10 years working extensively in Latin America, both teaching law for the US Government and representing families of imprisoned US citizens. Working with the US Embassy and local attorneys, she would try to assure the safety and well being of the prisoners and expedite their release. After the birth of her daughter in 1990, she left this risky practice and returned to the US where she has focused on domestic violence issues. A trip with her daughter to Senegal and South Africa, took her into the Zulu bush, where she built friendships that led to efforts to improve the local schools. Jan became interested in creating or joining a non-profit organization to raise money here to build and improve schools there. At that very same moment, she met Cindy Nofziger, was impressed by what Cindy and her merry band of former Peace Corps Volunteers had accomplished and was easily persuaded to join them in this very important and life changing work. Jan looks forward to contributing to this amazing enterprise.
Michael Gibbons served from 1976-79 as a Peace Corps agriculture extension worker and trainer in Sierra Leone, specializing in rice production (2 yrs in Kukuna Kambia District, 1 yr w/ the Ministry of Agriculture). He's worked in basic education, community development and social justice in Asia, Africa, Latin America and low-income areas of the USA with CARE International, Save the Children, Banyan Tree Foundation and as an indepdendent consultant. Michael now
teaches courses in the International Training and Education Program (ITEP) at the American University, coordinate the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict at the Council on Foreign Relations. He initiated the "Leadership & Learning", a program supporting inter-agency learning in basic education. Current projects include forming a funders' group for international education with Hewlett Foundation, program development in education with UNICEF, strategic planning with the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies, supporting International Rescue Committee post-conflict education in West Africa, promoting International Center for Child Labor and Education efforts on inclusion of marginalized children in education, and supporting selected local NGOs in Africa and Asia working on education. Michael has been back to SL working with NGOs and the Min of Education on school development and education since 2000.
JOSEPH OPALA served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1974 to 1978. He was a rice agriculture agent in Bumbuna in Tonkolili District in the Northern Province from 1974 to 1976. Later, he was Staff Archaeologist at the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown. After the Peace Corps, he taught African Studies at the University of Sierra Leone from 1985 to 1991, and was an advisor to Sierra Leone's president on cultural policy.
When Sierra Leone fell into anarchy in the 1990s, Mr. Opala joined with two Sierra Leonean human rights activists -- Zainab Bangura and Julius Spencer -- to found the Campaign for Good Governance, now Sierra Leone's foremost pro-democracy and human rights NGO. After Mr. Opala was forced to flee Sierra Leone in 1997 during the AFRC military coup, he returned to the U.S. where he was active trying to explain the country's plight to the outside world. He delivered briefings at the US State Department and in Congress, gave interviews to the media, and wrote op-eds for major national and international journals.
In recent years, he has acted as an advisor to the US National Park Service on African American history and as Scholar-in-Residence at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. In 2004 he was a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He teaches at James Madison University in Virginia.
He is known for his research on the "Gullah Connection," the long historical thread that links Africans in Sierra Leone and other countries on the "Rice Coast" of West Africa with the Gullah people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Events resulting from that research were chronicled in "Family Across the Sea," an award-winning PBS documentary broadcast throughout the US in 1991. In “The Language You Cry In,” a documentary released in 1998, his research traced an ancient African song preserved by a Gullah family in coastal Georgia to a village in Sierra Leone where the same song is still sung today.
More recently, Mr. Opala found documents in the New-York Historical Society that helped link a Gullah woman living in Charleston, South Carolina with her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, an enslaved African child taken from Sierra Leone in 1756, and resulted in "Priscilla's Homecoming" to Sierra Leone in 2005.
Mr. Opala has presented lectures at universities, museums, and other educational institutions throughout the country. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press. He has appeared on CBS "60 Minutes" and CNN, and on NPR's "The World, "Fresh Air," and "All Things Considered," programs. In 1991, his research was featured on Channel 7 TV in Washington, DC in a week-long series called the "African American Connection."
More about Joseph Opala on Wikipedia
and about his research on the Bunce Island Slave Castle.
Patsy (Swann) Spier served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1979-1981, working as a Primary Math Workshop Instructor. Patsy has a Master of Arts in Education from Adams State College in Alamosa, CO, and a Master of Arts in Global Studies with an emphasis in Global Health from the University of Denver. She has 20 years of experience as an educator; 12 of those years working in International schools overseas. Patsy traveled to Sierra Leone twice in 2004, and is currently living in Colorado.
Betsy Small has masters degrees in special education and cross-cultural counseling psychology. She has over twenty years of experience working with children and families across multiple settings including therapeutic residential, public and private schools. Betsy served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone from '84-'87, worked as Project Director for Africare in 1989, and was Director of War Child USA, a humanitarian organization helping children marginalized by war. She continues to maintain close ties with Sierra Leone.
Upon graduating from the University of Washington in Seattle, Peggy Garber and her husband Steve served in Sahn Malen of Pujehun District in Sierra Leone as Peace Corps Community Development Volunteers in 1967 and 1968. After the Peace Corps and helping Steve with several entrepreneurial endeavors, Peggy taught in adult education and at community colleges while raising their family. In 1981, she began teaching herself about computers, starting with the first IBM, 2 floppy disk, Personal Computer. Over the years she has done basic programming and network administration, graphics, video and sound editing, educational programs, DVD production and web design. Digital photography has become her passion. In 1995, she started her own company and continues to learn more every year. She is sharing her knowledge and skills with Schools for Salone as our Web Master.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, 1984-1987, Jana was a village based teacher trainer and a curriculum developer for a UNDP/UNESCO project. She worked in a refugee camp in Thailand for three years as a teacher supervisor, trainer and curriculum developer in a program that prepared Hmong, Mien, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees for resettlement in the United States. She was an Associate Peace Corps Director in Uganda and Ghana where she developed and managed projects in small enterprise development, primary education teacher training, deaf education, art education, secondary math and science ed, and for water and sanitation. Jana has developed and implemented comprehensive training programs for refugees, teachers, community development workers, and Peace Corps volunteers. She resettled in Portland, OR in 1997, along with her partner, Holly, and two calico cats from Ghana. She worked for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory for seven years, serving as a Senior Program Advisor and Alaska State Coordinator. Jana is presently the Program Manager for Mercy Corps' Youth Internet Exchange Initiative connecting youth in the Middle East with youth in the United States. Jana holds a master’s degree in International Intercultural Development Education from Florida State University.
In April 2008, the Schools for Salone Board met in Seattle to dicuss our progress and plan for the future of the organization.
