STARKVILLE – One of Jesse Carver’s most memorable moments from four years of volunteer work in the remote village of Katse, high in the mountains of Lesotho, came just a few weeks ago, when he and 39 members of Kappa Sigma Fraternity handed out 70 green soccer jerseys to a schoolyard full of children.
“To us, a sports uniform might not be much,” Carver told the Starkville Rotary Club on Monday at the Hilton Garden Inn. “How many times do you get a piece of clothing and it’s just another shirt for your drawer? But when I was there … and we handed them out, these kids were absolutely overjoyed. It’s a unique sound when you hear the first celebrations of a team coming together.”
Carver serves on the board of the Reclaimed Project, a Fondren-based nonprofit that supports vulnerable children, orphans and widows through construction work in Lesotho, located in South Africa, and Marks, where afterschool programs are provided to under-resourced students in Quitman County.
Since 2015, Mississippi State University’s Kappa Sigma chapter has supported the organization through its annual Charity Bowl fundraiser and spring break trips to Katse. What began as a $2,500 effort has grown into more than $1 million raised in the past two years – a national record for the most money raised during a single fraternity or sorority philanthropy event, Carver said.
Service projects in the village each year are guided by needs determined by a local church. Early projects focused primarily on survival, including building a coop for meat chickens so children could take their HIV/AIDS medication with protein. The efforts quickly expanded to building homes for the population of majority orphaned children and has since grown to include a full high school campus.
As it stands, less than 16% of children in Lesotho receive a high school education, Carver said.
“(We) just try to step in and be the father for the fatherless and the mother for the kids who don’t have moms,” Carver told The Dispatch following the meeting. “… The whole (idea) was, if these were my kids, what would I do? And the education was not cutting it.”
The five-acre campus project began four years ago. Volunteers have since built four small homes, an administrative building and a skills training center for carpentry, masonry and mechanics. When fraternity students aren’t in Lesotho to work, the Reclaimed Project employs a crew of local men to carry on the job year-round.
Two weeks ago, crews laid the final brick on the high school, called Reclaimed English Medium Academy, or REMA, and began work on an adjacent sports complex with futsal, tennis, basketball and volleyball courts.
Students have already begun practicing basketball and futsal – a variant of soccer – wearing green-and-white “REMA Rams” jerseys.
‘A very, very special place’
Ethan Lindsey, a senior member of the fraternity, has made the 16-hour flight and 11-hour bus ride to Lesotho four times, mixing concrete and laying tens of thousands of bricks by hand.
“I’ve gotten to see it go from nothing,” Lindsey told The Dispatch on Monday. “… So to see where we are today and having a fully functioning school, it’s pretty incredible to see the way that the Lord is working over there. It’s a very, very special place.”
One of Lindsey’s most meaningful memories came on his first trip, helping build a home for 11-year-old Malemo and his sister, who were orphaned and living in a corner of their aunt’s home while working as shepherds.
When Lindsey returned earlier this month, the two spent an afternoon at a mountain stream, where Malemo showed him how to fish.
“They’ve got their little fishing rods and these little bitty baits, you can barely even see it, and he started casting and I’m like, ‘There’s no way this is going to catch a fish.’ The next thing you know he pulls up a big ol’ trout and … well OK, I stand corrected,” he said laughing.
Lindsey said the village has come to feel like a second home.
“A lot of the locals there are people that I would consider friends I talk to on a weekly basis,” he said. “… It’s crazy because their culture, the way they grew up, the way they live life, it could not be any more different than our life. … You get to know these guys so well, you realize there is no difference between them and us, even if they are in a remote village in the mountains of Africa. … Those people are family.”
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
