26 June 2009
Finally! Tad Gets to Say Ta-Da!
Posted by admin under: recognition .
What if you’ve grown up with a world-reknowned columnist as a dad? Even if you’ve been able to write your own stories there’s got to be some pressure to prove yourself. I don’t know Tad Malone personally, but I’ve been waiting for most of a year to find out what the result of his epic Eagle Project would be. Tad’s father was kind enough to share a cool story about his troop riding along the Chisholm Trail in Oklahoma. At the same time, Tad was trying to help some younger kids he’d met as described in a story by Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News.
Ask Tad Malone, a Homestead High School junior, who took on a project that, looking back, seems slightly insane even to him.
“Kids needed help,” he says, “so I thought I’d help.”
Kids in Africa. Orphan kids that Tad met on a family trip in 2005 to a place called Children’s Town in Zambia. The 300 children had people who cared about them, people who rescued some of them from the streets of Lusaka after their parents had died of AIDS complications.
But they needed things – lots of things. Especially books, pencils, paper, computers – all the things that make a school a school.
“It started out more as things we could find for them to use,” says Tad, 17, who thought he was on to a swell project when he began more than two years ago.
I’ll say. His first exposure to Children’s Town was in 2005 and the conclusion of the project has only now come to pass four years later. Why was the project delayed? I’ll quote Tad in his letter of thanks to his supporters.
When I last updated you last September, the container had just been shipped from the back lot of Resurrection School in Sunnyvale. The container had been there so long (two years) that the younger students thought that it was a permanent fixture of the school. Even the driveway on which it sat had been resurfaced – and when the container was finally removed it left an unpaved area that remains to this day.
Anyway, thanks to some last minute support from the attorney Dick Alexander and Cypress Semi CEO TJ Rodgers to help cover some unexpected costs, the container was on its way. Four hundred students from Resurrection School, along with reporters and camera crews from KNTV, KTVU and KRON, came out to cover the send-off ceremony. Mike Cassidy in the SJ Mercury-News, who had written a column about the project months before, wrote a follow-up on the send-off as well. It seemed like a perfect finish to a long and difficult project.
Little did I know . . .
The plan was to truck the container to Los Angeles, where it would be placed aboard a Maersk vessel to cross the Pacific, into the Indian Ocean, and then on to the port of Beira, Mozambique – where it would be off-loaded onto a truck and driven about a thousand miles inland to Lusaka, Zambia.
Well, the first part of the plan worked neatly. By early November, the container was in Beira. But at that point, everything began to fall apart. Apparently, the woman I was working with at the shipping company was in over her head when it came to shipping to Africa . . .and as a result, she failed to file the necessary paperwork. So, the container sat for almost three months at the port. We had no idea what was going on – until we were suddenly notified that unless the overdue storage costs were paid, the container would be sold and its contents auctioned off. After a quick scramble, I agreed to divide the costs between the shipping company, Maersk, and what little money remained in the Troop account from donations. We just made it.
So, finally, the container was off to Zambia, where it arrived in late February/early March (communications with Africa were never very clear).
Then we hit another snag: the container arrived at the beginning of the longest continuous spell of rain that Zambia had seen in a half-century – more than sixty consecutive days. Luckily, the container had a guardian angel in Rene Schulz, the Belgian director of Children’s Town’s parent organization, DAPP. He ordered the container placed inside of the DAPP compound for safe-keeping until the roads to Malambanyama were dry enough to handle equipment.
And that brings us to late May, and the transporting – at last! – of the container to Children’s Town. Even then, there were snags, most notably the added cost of the motorized crane that needed to accompany the container truck. Luckily, Marvell Semiconductor came through at absolutely the last moment to save the day.
Of course, the purpose of all of this was to help the kids at Children’s Town. Getting the government to support them in a very public way is a great method to bolster this successful program. Tad Malone’s project gave the government a great excuse to come out and publicize Children’s Town.
According to Tad’s letter to his supporters the Zambian Minister of Education attended the celebration of the container’s arrival and the distribution of its contents. The national television station attended as well as local leaders including tribal chiefs. African media aren’t the only ones noticing this enormous Eagle Project. Tad’s local station ran a story about his project (yes, they reveal his first name is actually Patrick) and from the size of the crowds in the video the 3,000 hours spent on his project could easily have just come from the cheering throngs celebrating the partnership of America and Zambia through Eagle Scout Tad Malone.
While I’ve been waiting with bated breath to find out what happened with the conclusion of Tad’s project I know that he’s more interested to know that his effort is not isolated and that others are willing to take a closer look at Children’s Town as a charity effort they can support through their donations or as part of a larger project. I just want to say, along with hundreds of African children and their guardians, “Thank you, Tad”.
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