MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE STUDENT TO SPEAK
ON HER EFFORTS TO HELP GIRLS IN ZIMBABWE

Memory Bandera is co-founder of the Girl Child Network Trust, an organization that aims to give moral, educational, emotional, and financial support to girls.

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. ¡ Memory Bandera, a Mount Holyoke College sophomore who co-founded an organization to help empower young women in her native Zimbabwe, will discuss her group's origin, goals, accomplishments, and challenges on Wednesday, April 24, at 7 PM in Room 101 of Dwight Hall. The talk is free and open to the public, and the room is wheelchair accessible.

The organization she helped found, the Girl Child Network Trust, is a nonprofit organization that conducts awareness campaigns, workshops, panel discussions, conferences, leadership and training programs, and fundraising projects throughout Zimbabwe.The group, now with fifty clubs and more than 3,000 members at schools across that African nation, has constructed a safe house and is building a "safe village" for victims of child sexual abuse.

Girls in Zimbabwe face serious problems, from sexual abuse to homelessness to forced marriage. An estimated 30 percent of the 1,500 people who die of AIDS each week in Zimbabwe are girls between the ages of 15 and 18. While a student at Zengeza 1 High School in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe, Bandera, her teacher, and her friends in 1999 founded the Girl Child Network Trust, an organization that aims to give moral, educational, emotional, and financial support to girls, connecting them with one another and building their self-confidence.

Although there is no charge for the talk, members of the audience are asked to bring an article of summer clothing suitable for a girl age 2 to 16, to be donated to the "safe village." Bandera's talk is sponsored by the Council of Deacons, a leadership and fellowship organization for Protestant students that is based at Eliot House, home of the College's Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.