Rhonda Fortran Barona ’78 feels joy whenever she thinks of the classroom in Tanzania that bears the name of her late mother, Charlotte Elizabeth Griffiths Fortran ’44.
After all Fortran, a retired Binghamton, N.Y.-area elementary school teacher who passed away in 2008, had been a world-traveler, Barona said of her mother, known as “Betty” by her Cortland classmates.
“She had made a list of all the places she had traveled to year by year, just like me,” said Barona, a retired recreation manager for the City of West Palm Beach, Florida.
Moreover, elementary school children had been dear to Fortran’s heart from when she taught in the Chenango Valley Central School district.
“My mother taught every grade and loved them all,” Barona reminisced.
Fortran also had been an active missions advocate in her local Baptist church, so everything fit in Barona’s mind to combine her mother's love of travel and teaching to leave her mother’s legacy emblazoned outside a one-room classroom at Kurusanga Primary School in Nyamuswa, Tanzania.
Barona has achieved that dream.
Combining both individual donations, recycling proceeds from selling collected aluminum beverage cans, and funds raised by selling donated furniture online, Barona’s fundraising campaign called “Expanding Horizons” has raised more than $32,000 for her cause to help Tanzania’s schoolchildren.
In 2018, when construction was completed, dignitaries and villagers from Nyamuswa attended a dedication ceremony for the newly completed Charlotte Elizabeth Fortran classroom at the Kurusanga Primary School. The money Barona raised in America also supported six years of school fees and supplies for six students.
In 2018, $9,000 of those funds also underwrote ceiling, wall and flooring repairs to seven classrooms, necessitated by the collapse of a classroom, resulting in a death and multiple injuries.
That work was recently completed. The third part of the gift of $10,000 to the school will be used to provide water systems to four schools.
“A lack of access to water is an enormous barrier to education and health for Tanzanian children,” Barona explained. “Expanding Horizons’ funds will be used as a matching grant to encourage more people to donate to reach the goal of $50,000.”
It all started in 2013, when Barona had vacationed to Tanzania with one of her three daughters, then college-age Melissa. The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region and bordering Uganda to the north and Kenya to the northeast.
Standing in sharp contrast to the majestic beauty of the country’s sweeping, grassy parklands teeming with zebras, wildebeest, elephants and giraffes was the condition of the African country’s educational system.
“I asked my guide, ‘My itinerary told me I was going to visit a school today,’” Barona said. “He pointed to this dilapidated building we were literally sitting in front of that looked horrendous and said, ‘Well, it’s right there.’”
The headmaster came out and gave the pair a tour of the severely understaffed school.
“The school had dirt floors,” Barona said. “The walls were filthy. There were no supplies whatsoever. Every student had a notebook and a pencil and that literally was the only thing we saw. The teacher didn’t have a desk. There was no blackboard, no books, no globe, no crayons, nothing. The school had no running water, meaning students used a hole in the ground for a toilet.”
She asked what the headmaster needed most. The answer was food, to convince Maasai parents to allow their children to attend school rather than tend cattle or complete housekeeping duties, work customarily handled by Tanzanian children. The school meal was often the only one students ate that day.
“Afterward, I turned to my daughter and said, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing. But we’re doing something when we get home,” Barona said.
It was no accident that Barona’s trip to Tanzania was coordinated by Access 2 Tanzania, a 501( c) 3 nonprofit based in St. Paul, Minnesota that recruits volunteers and solicits private donations to improve education in the country’s more remote and forgotten villages.
“On the last day of the tour, we were handed a one-sheet brochure about Project Zawadi and were told, ‘If you’re interested in supporting us, you can go online,’” Barona said.
Barona researched for herself the urgent need she had seen everywhere in the country, and the way that the nonprofit assists African schools.
“Project Zawadi works directly with multiple schools in Nyamuswa,” she said.
Barona then got busy in the way she had learned to do long ago as a newly minted recreation professional. Right out of SUNY Cortland, she had worked under the supervision of Fran Mainella, the woman who ultimately served as the director of the National Park Service under President George W. Bush.
“All through my career, I would get in a certain situation where I would say, ‘What would Fran do?’ just to figure it out,” Barona said.
She and Melissa formed Expanding Horizons, which works closely with Project Zawadi and has its own website to explain the mission and seek additional volunteers and donations.
Barona has raised funds so consistently with such clear goals in mind that the Project Zawadi recently asked her to become a “lead,” a role she has willingly accepted. Project Zawadi will write a blog about her service as a way to encourage others to take action.
“I used to do fundraising as part of my job at the City of West Palm Beach,” said Barona, who retired in 2018 after 37 years there.
“We didn't want people to have to hand us money, so we ended up requesting people collect aluminum cans to be turned in for recycling.”
Working door to door with informational fliers donated by a local printer, Barona had collected 7,600 pounds of aluminum, that is, more than 258,000 cans, until the social distancing practices resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic shut down that approach to fundraising.
“You have to collect a lot of cans to make any money,” Barona said, noting that, unlike New York state, there’s no deposit fee collected and returned in Florida.
Barona recently learned the school repairs are completed. Once the viral related travel concerns are over, she will return to Tanzania with Melissa as well as other family supporters, including her brother, Randy, and Julie-Ann, wife of her late brother Rod.
“They are excited to see the construction and meet the students firsthand,” Barona said.