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Sunday, April 2, 2006
AIDS photo project spurs effort to raise tuition for orphans
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||
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When Michael Odokara-Okigbo had a chance to go to Nigeria in 2004 with his mother, who was speaking there on World Aids Day, she told him he couldn't come along without a "purpose." Turns out the "purpose" Odokara-Okigbo came up with — a photo essay on children orphaned by AIDS — served as the catalyst for the nonprofit organization he is now getting off the ground. "I went to one resource place (in Nigeria) — I walked in and there was a woman lying on the floor" waiting for treatment because there was nowhere to seat her, said Odokara-Okigbo, who is finishing the tax paperwork for his nonprofit, Mugidi, which will provide school tuition for Nigerian orphans. The photographs have been displayed across the state, but Odokara-Okigbo was particularly impressed with the response from students at the private Waynflete School in Portland, where he is a sophomore. The photos were displayed there first, not long after he returned from the trip. Odokara-Okigbo said the pictures brought human faces to suffering in the Third World that the mostly affluent private-school students know about from books and news reports but aren't personally affected by. He said he wanted the photos, taken by a classmate, to provide that personal connection. "We have it made," Odokara-Okigbo said of his classmates. "We're really blessed." The 16-year-old, who was born in New York but grew up bouncing from country to country (his mother is a former World Bank employee who now runs the nonprofit Women In Need Inc. in Portland) said his experiences abroad were tough — never having a stable group of friends — but provided him with a career goal early on. As a 4-year-old living in Italy, he ran across a child at an orphanage with a cleft palette, a facial birth defect. He would meet many children with facial deformities during his childhood. "He was still so happy," Odokara-Okigbo said of the child in Italy. "I've seen other kids who aren't even happy, they don't want to talk. . . . I think that's bad because the way they see themselves is probably the way they see the world." So Odokara-Okigbo decided to try to become a plastic surgeon, so he can travel abroad to help orphans with deformities. Before he's out of high school, he hopes to turn Mugidi into a student-run organization. His pitch to donors? Perhaps this comparison, tossed out during a recent interview: "It's $400. That's for uniforms, books . . . basically schooling for a year (in Nigeria). Waynflete tuition is something like $17,000 or $18,000 a year," he said.
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