When Clarke, now 25, first visited Cameroon, she was a junior at Wesleyan University participating in a study abroad program through the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT. When she goes back next week, she will be there as the executive director for Breaking Ground (www.breaking-ground.org), the non-profit she established with friends and family for the purpose of “bringing people together to facilitate small scale, community-initiated projects in Cameroon,” a republic of about 18 million located in Central and Western Africa.
During her first trip to Cameroon, Clarke was so impressed by the community of people in the village of Doumbouo and their hospitality that she felt she needed to give something back. “When I left in 2004, I knew that Cameroon wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with it,” Clarke says.
Upon returning to Wesleyan, she focused her studies on the republic, eventually deciding that she could repay the community that had welcomed her so completely by returning to the area to teach English. A proposal she submitted to the Christopher Brodigan Fund earned her a grant to pursue her goal, but it was only sufficient to cover her airfare. Still, Clarke was determined.
“I’m really stubborn,” she says, “and I like to get what I want.” She resolved to fund the rest of her trip on her own. But when she began telling people what she intended to do, word spread, and miraculously, two of her mother’s colleagues decided to donate to her cause.
With these limited funds, Clarke returned to Cameroon, residing with the same host family who had accommodated her on her first trip and teaching at a school run by her host-father. The government of Cameroon had recently started promoting English education, so Clarke knew she was filling a community need, but as she surveyed the dilapidated school building with its dirt floors and lack of potable water she began to wonder if teaching English was the most important thing she could be doing. To find out, Clarke went straight to the community. “I asked people, ‘If you could do anything, what would it be?’ and hands down, they said they would cement the school’s floors.”
So Clarke looked around, got a few estimates, and determined that on her own, she could afford to do one classroom. It was then that she recalled the unsolicited donations she had received from her mother’s colleagues, and decided to see if she could raise more money. She went to an internet café and wrote home asking friends and family for help, explaining that “even a donation of $10 can go a LONG way here.”
At the time, Clarke had hoped to raise $500 through her email campaign. Over the course of her seven-month stay, she amassed $12,000.
When Clarke finally departed Cameroon in August of 2006, she left behind “a well, six cemented classrooms, a cement staircase and accompanying flagpole, a water faucet, repaired school buildings, several beautiful murals, and ... a brand new library stocked with wonderful, donated books.” And thus, Breaking Ground was born.
Upon her return to the United States, she continued to work with fellow SIT alums Sarah Oxford, 24, and Brendan Schwartz, 23, to create the nonprofit so that more projects could be completed. But it is the people of Cameroon, Clarke insists, who deserve the credit for the work Breaking Ground has done there.
“All of the 20-something kids in Cameroon,” she says, “we’re not the experts. We’re just the catalysts. Unless the community is invested, (the projects) won’t be sustainable when we leave.”
For a 20-something kid who fell into non-profit administration by accident, Clarke certainly sounds like an expert.
— Belinda Ray