DETROIT, March 8, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- Marygrove College will welcome Khris Nedam, founder of Kids 4 Afghan Kids, a non-profit organization, as the featured presenter during its 2005 Legends and Legacies Alumni Lecture Series on Friday, April 15, 2005, at 7 p.m.
Khris Nedam is a 1998 graduate of Marygrove's Masters of Arts in Teaching program. In '98 when Nedam was a teacher at Meads Mill Middle School in Northville, Michigan, she invited Seraj Wardak, the second secretary to the Charge d'Affaires at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C., to address her sixth grade class. Her students learned the harsh realities of life in Afghanistan: 25 percent of Afghani children who survive their first year die before age 5; only 11 percent of rural Afghanis have access to safe water; over 10 million landmines remain, threatening farmers plowing their fields and children playing outdoors.
Her class decided to act. Under Nedam's leadership, Kids 4 Afghan Kids was formed to re-establish educational facilities for Afghani boys and girls and to address the desperate health conditions they face.
In three years, Nedam and her students raised enough money to construct a six-room school, a medical center, a bakery/kitchen, a guesthouse and a community well for residents of Wonkhai Valley, a mountainous area three hours from Kabul.
The Office of Alumni Relations and the Master of Social Justice Program invite Marygrove alumni and the general public to hear Nedam at the Legends and Legacies-Alumni Lecture Series on Friday, April 15, 2005, at 7 p.m., in Alumnae Hall in the Madame Cadillac Building.
The biennial Legends and Legacies series debuted in 2003 to showcase alumni whose activities have had a significant impact on the lives of people in the U.S. and abroad. The 2003 featured alumna was Sharon Rodgers Simone from the class of 1967, whose court case and activism resulted in the Child Abuse Accountability Act of 1994. Simone and her sister's civil suit against their father for child abuse decades earlier was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, Ultimate Betrayal, in which Marlo Thomas played Simone.
Legends and Legacies is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Diane Puhl, director of Alumni Relations, 313-927-1443, or dpuhl@marygrove.edu.