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Help For The Helpers

By Martha Pickerill

David Krause's group raised money to build this school and hire a teacher for kids in Madagascar.

When David Krause and his team were dinosaur hunting on Madagascar in 1996, local kids stood nearby, fascinated. Like other villagers, they offered advice about where to hunt for fossils. They even helped cover bones in heavy plaster and carry them.

The kids didn't speak English, but some local scientists helped translate for the Americans. "We'd say, 'It's Tuesday. Why aren't you in school?'" Krause remembers. The answer was simple and sad: there was no school in their poor village of Berivotra.

"We finally realized the way to repay the villagers for their many kindnesses-letting us work on the land and helping us with the dinosaur bones," says Krause. He and his fellow workers hired a teacher for the village. It cost them only $500 a year.

When the paleontologists came back in 1998, there were 60 kids, ages 5 to 17, in school. "They were all in the first grade," says Krause, "because they were all learning to read and write for the first time."

Eager to help even more, Krause set up the Madagascar Ankizy Fund to raise money. (Ankizy means children in Malagasy, the local language.) In 1999 the fund paid for a new two-room schoolhouse and a second teacher. Soon the village will have a new well for clean water and-for the first time-toilets! M.A.F. members also hope to start a school in a village 20 miles away.

Krause is a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Some volunteers from its medical school have gone to Madagascar to give desperately needed checkups and dental treatment.

Krause visits U.S. schools to talk about dinosaurs and tells students about the conditions in Madagascar. As a result, U.S. kids are raising money. "Some raise a little bit of money, some raise a lot," he says. "But any amount is a lot in Madagascar. We can make a meaningful difference in the lives of kids on the other side of the planet."

Next: Shaken India Picks Up the Pieces