12 months ago
WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) --- Most high school kids spend the academic year trying to get through school. Ashley Speyer of Northwest Washington spent her school year trying to build a school half a world away, in Tanzania. She did it last year. And now, she's doing it again.
It started after Ashley's sophomore year in the summer of 2007. She and her mother, Mary Speyer, spent part of the summer living in the small village of Moivaro, where Ashley had the chance to see the village school.
"It was just basically a wooden shack with dirt floors that just had a couple benches, lacked electricity, lacked plumbing. I mean they had one piece of chalk for 40 kids and this was just incredibly disturbing to my mom and me," Ashley told 9News Now.
Returning to DC for her junior year, Ashley met with a lawyer and created a non-profit foundation (http://www.bricksandbooks.org) as the first step in raising money to help Moivaro build a new school.
"I started raising money in December and by March I had raised 25 thousand dollars, and by June the school was finished," she said.
Ashley and her mother returned to Moivaro in July for the ribbon-cutting, and then returned to Washington for Ashley's senior year in high school. But don't expect her to coast. "No, I'm certainly not done. Now what I hope to do is go back this summer. We're actually raising money now to build a new school in a nearby village," she said.
