Senegal RPCV Tony Ends concluded that the most important thing he might do to better their situation would be to bring one promising student to the United States for an education, equipping the student to return to his rural homeland and make a real difference
Making a difference one person at a time
Frank Byrd
It is good, in troubled times, to be able to write a true story with a happy ending, based on goodness, courage, character and perseverance.
This story begins in the mid-1970s in remote northeastern Senegal, West Africa, where a young, idealistic Peace Corps volunteer came to teach.
The teacher was Tony Ends, who on returning to the U.S. was to become a copy editor at the Times-News and the husband of Claudia Morton, daughter of Jim and Nancy Morton of Hendersonville, well-known to longtime residents as two of the most selfless and giving people in town. As one might expect of someone who would marry into the Morton clan, Tony was himself an exceedingly principled and committed person.
Tony taught in Senegal at a regional high school, with talented students of gentle nobility yet desperate poverty. With no electricity, his students studied by lanterns and some, far from their home villages, slept each night on benches in the local train station.
Tony concluded that the most important thing he might do to better their situation would be to bring one promising student to the United States for an education, equipping the student to return to his rural homeland and make a real difference.
The student to whom Tony made this far-fetched-sounding proposal was Hamidou Sakhanokho, who was about 14 at the time. Hamidou was perhaps the brightest of Tony's 260 students, but from one of the remotest villages of them all, existing by subsistence agriculture, with no running water or electricity. When Tony left Senegal at the conclusion of his Peace Corps tour, Hamidou must have thought that Tony's talk of bringing him to the United States was nothing but a fantasy.
Tony has never been a wealthy person, and it was more than 10 years before he was in a position to make good on his promise and send for Hamidou. Even then, he "maxed out" his credit card in purchasing Hamidou's ticket, drawing on friends at his church, St. James in Hendersonville, and his former church in Myrtle Beach for help.
With Tony then living in Hendersonville, it was only natural to turn to Blue Ridge Community College in the fall of 1987 as the starting point for Hamidou's American college education.
It was at this point that I got to know Hamidou, one of the kindest, gentlest, most genuinely decent human beings ever to walk into my life.
It's been said, "It takes a village to raise a child," but I think it is equally true that it takes a community to make a life-changing difference in an adult. There were a number of communities here that got involved with Hamidou, including Tony's Myrtle Beach church, which provided scholarship help; the Women of St. James, who paid for a ticket home after Hamidou's first year here, and his Blue Ridge Community College family, who raised the money for emergency airfare home a year later when his mother died.
On Hamidou's first trip home, he bought a blanket to take as a gift for his mother, as she had never before owned a new one. Each time he left, we would all hold our breath, knowing how much he loved his family and homeland, realizing how much easier it would be for him to give up his dream and stay home once there.
But return he did, graduating from BRCC in 1989 and transferring to Berea College in Kentucky. At Berea, Hamidou earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture and met Ramona, his future wife, a black American student from Birmingham, Ala., on her way to a career in public interest law.
My contact with Hamidou over the ensuing years was sporadic at best. I did attend his wedding in Birmingham and followed from afar his progress through graduate school at Auburn University and Alabama A&T.
It was only a week ago, when Dr. Hamidou Sakhanokho, Ph.D., returned to Hendersonville for a conference at Kanuga, that I was able to learn the rest of the story.
After completing his doctorate, Hamidou's original plan had been to take his American bride back to Senegal in order to teach modern agricultural practices there. He found, however, that employment opportunities there would be limited, particularly at a salary that would enable him to provide much help to his village.
Thus he ended up taking a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture research station in Poplarville, Miss., as a research molecular geneticist, a job he likes and at which he is apparently very good.
Rather than moving back home, Hamidou and his brother, an expatriate who worked in Paris, have undertaken a series of development projects in their home village. It's like squeezing blood from a turnip to get Hamidou to talk about himself, but, between us, Nancy Morton and I have found that the brothers have thus far built a school house, a health clinic, sent two villagers for nurse's training in order to staff it, and a water tower. Hamidou's current project is financing a new house for his extended family. Hamidou and his brother will probably never rest until the village has electricity, with electrical service currently limited to that provided by generator.
My hunch is that Hamidou may well make significant contributions to plant science in this country, just as he is making dramatic contributions to the residents of one small village in his native land.
May God richly bless the likes of Tony Ends and Hamidou Sakhanokho, and may we all be reminded how providing a helping hand to one person can eventually make a life-changing difference to many.
Frank Byrd, a Times-News community columnist, lives in Henderson County. His column appears on the second Sunday of the month.
