|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Margo McAuliffe, a Menlo Park resident and former trigonometry teacher at Menlo-Atherton High School, is being honored as one of six “local heroes” by the Midpen Media Center for her work establishing a school for girls in Kenya.
A screening of video interviews with Ms. McAuliffe and the other five honorees is part of a two-hour reception and award ceremony that begins at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 20, at the media center at 900 San Antonio Road in Palo Alto.
The other recipients are Nora Razon, an undocumented immigrant who endured abuse, alienation and secrecy on her way to a college degree and U.S. citizenship; Margaret Petros, an Iraqi refugee who offers aid to other refugees; Marlayna Tuiasosopo, a Samoan woman now working in the U.S. as an engineer and entrepreneur in teaching reading; Susan Lutter, who had a life-changing experience working with Koko, the sign-language-using gorilla residing in Woodside; and Chris Bischof, founder and principal of Eastside Preparatory Academy in East Palo Alto.
Midpen spokeswoman Louise Pencavel asks that those interested in attending RSVP via louise@midpenmedia.org or by calling (650) 494-8686, ext. 36.
Ms. McAuliffe’s interview will be shown on Cable Channel 30 at 9:30 p.m. on two Tuesdays: May 23 and 30. The full set of six interviews is set to air at 1 p.m. on two Sundays (May 28 and June 4) and at 8 p.m. on two Wednesdays ( May 31 and June 7).
‘I just kind of did it’
For Ms. McAuliffe, the trajectory that led her toward this honor began when she realized, after retiring from M-A, that she’d probably always wanted to teach girls in Africa.
Occasional contact with a Kenyan priest, Father Daniel Kiriti, when he visited the Palo Alto-based Thomas Merton Center for Catholic Spiritual Development, led to Ms. McAuliffe discussing with him the idea of teaching math in Africa, she said.
At the time, Father Kiriti was in the process of separating a coed Kenyan high school into boys and girls schools and developing plans for a girls high school in Naivasha, a town of 350,000 located 65 miles north of the capital, Nairobi.
In September 2005, after making some preliminary arrangements, Ms. McAuliffe packed for Kenya’s equatorial climate and headed for the airport. “I just kind of did it,” she said. “I was 69 at the time. I got on the airplane and they closed the door and I said, ‘My God, what have I done?'”
She eventually realized, after encountering “very good” math teachers already on the job, that teaching math in Africa was not her destiny and that were she to take such a job, she would be taking it from a Kenyan teacher. She saw a greater need, she said: fundraising.
Click here to see a 2007 Almanac story on Ms. McAuliffe.
—
