Posted by Sanjiv Prabhakaran on Apr 20, 2018
 
Kevin Cahill delivered his "What I Do" talk and described his role as Youth Chair in the Youth Exchange RYLA program and Model UN programs.
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Following that we had Julie Marner from Burundi International talk about her various projects of teaching English to the young and the old in Burundi. Julie Marner is the Executive Director of Burundi Friends International (BFI), a San Diego based non-profit working to reduce extreme poverty in Burundi, East Africa. Julie oversees BFI's programming, funding and implementation of projects.
Her love for Burundi grew in 2011 when she taught English at Light University. With no resources except a blackboard and a piece of chalk, Julie taught English Communication to 70 college students for 4 hours each day and since then, her passion to create more opportunities for Burundians hasn't stopped. Julie's other career is as a musician having played at local churches for the past 20 years. 
 
 
 
She talked about helping the poor Burundian students of middle school and high school to teach English in schools so that they can advance to colleges and universities in and outside Burundi. There are about 500,000 orphans in Burundi. It costs about $1000 per student per year of college. The Del Mar Rotary club has initiated a $55,000 grant for shipping English text books to Burundi schools. BFI now has over 3000 volunteer teachers. The number of BFI clubs and students have increased significantly since 2011 as seen in about charts.
 
More information can be found at Burundi International.
 
 
Bill Sutton awarded the Joshua Malawi school certificate to Julie that represents donation of school supplies by DMSB to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
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