The View From Fourth Grade
By Ousmane, Coulibaly, Operations Coordinator
Can education help make a little boy with big dreams dream come true? Yaya — a student at Mali Rising’s Ben Dixon Primary School — sure thinks so.
Yaya Doumbia is 10 years old and a fourth grader at Mali Rising's Ben Dixon Primary School in Manabougou. Manabougou is a remote town in southern Mali. According to Yaya, education is the only thing that could help him achieve his goal – to become an engineer. He is a positive little boy who would like to study hard to succeed in life.
Yaya may be a small fourth grader, but he has big dreams for himself, his family, and his home village.
Coming from a poor farming family, Yaya is affected by his parents' economic situation. He would like to continue studying so that he can achieve his dreams and help his family.
“I hope to study and become an engineer. As I am from a poor family, I felt powerless to change my parents’ current economic situation. When I see my parents struggling to make ends meet sometimes I get upset. They are farmers and everything depends on the rainfall. When there is not enough rain, the family is in trouble,” explained Yaa. “I do want to study and make changes for our family in the future. This is why I would like to choose a career different from my parents by becoming an engineer.”
Yaya also expressed some concerns about Manabougou and other challenges that he is facing at Ben Dixon Elementary School and his plans for fixing those problems.
“We have many problems in our village. In the village there is not enough boreholes for clean water, no good roads, no quality health clinic, and no middle school. Currently in Ben Dixon Elementary School of Manabougou, there are two grades in each classroom. I am doing the 4th grade and we are sharing the classroom with the 3rd graders,” said Yaya.
This little boy has big dreams, and one of his goals is to build more classrooms for the village and to drill more boreholes so that the population of Manabougou can have access to clean water. Yaya illustrates the real power of education – a good education empowers the individual to improve their own life, but also to help others.
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