Video - Joyce Wanican - "Scholars Under the Trees"
(November 2007) Joyce Wanican, the International Rescue Committee's education program manager in northern Uganda, welcomes IRC supporters to the 2007 Freedom Award Dinner in New York and shares this story: She was working with the IRC, training teachers at a refugee camp when rebel troops came through. She lost her home and all her posessions. All her students fled with their families--and almost had to miss the all-important national exams. But Joyce wouldn't let that happen. She successfully appealed to the government of Uganda to reschedule the test. She found all her students at another refugee camp, 65 miles away, and asked them to go back to school the next morning and start studying. "Every big tree in the camp became a classroom," she said. "We had no time to waste." Despite everything, Joyce's students' exams came back with the "best results ever."
(3 min, 12 sec)
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