Making an Impact in Togo
Brian Lamar Nixon discusses that as NC State student body president he developed a project to send school supplies to a university in the country of Togo.
Interview on 2011-09-09 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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I guess I'll start that one off by saying the reason NC State's so dear to me and I say that the DNA of NC State is all me is because,
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where can a guy walk from a little town called Denver, North Carolina and walk into an institution and in five years get to sit on the Board of Trustees of a major institution,
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be able to be the chief executive officer of the student body of a major institution, be chief financial officer for them, but also to travel,
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because through the program I also had an opportunity to go to Africa. We sent some students to Africa. I got to go over there for about a week's journey.
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We went to Benin, Togo, down there on the Ivory Coast, and that was a major experience. That was a life-changing experience to actually go to Africa, go to the villages,
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to experience what life was over there and to try to do something when you got back. So one of the things we wanted to do is that the things
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that we have here in this country that a lot of people take advantage of or take for granted is just having paper, having access to books, having writing utensils.
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So we started a project called Project Togo where we would set up different areas across campus and if at the end of the year when we're all clearing stuff out
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and getting ready to chuck it in the trashcan or whatever, we said if you've got any notebooks, no matter if it's got fifty pages or a hundred pages,
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if you got stuff-tear the stuff out with your name on it, but if you've got blank notebooks drop them in there, if you've got pens, pencils.
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If you've got textbooks that we know next year are not going to be-. We've got a new edition coming up and you're not going to get anything when you trade them back in,
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all they're going to do is get burned or recycled, we collected those and we were able to collect several pretty large containers and ship them over to Togo
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for the University of Benin to start their own little library kind of thing. We did that a couple of times, we had two phases of that, so we sent them a lot of paper,
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a lot of pencils, and the university was very gracious. Whatever we collected they also helped with some matching material. So they were able to have books,
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they were able to have paper, pens, things they did not have, and the people over there were very, very appreciative.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
