Bintou goes to America

One of our Bourse Jackie students was recently invited by the U.S. Embassy in Mali to participate in a U.S. State Department funded program to encourage female leadership and economic empowerment. We love her letter and the fact that she was inspired by her trip of the possibilities of being an “educated and emancipated woman.”

I am Bintou Mahamane Dicko, I am 22 years old. I am from a modest family in Timbuktu, Mali where I spent all my childhood, my primary/second and my High School with my mother’s daily supports. The values that matters for me in life are: Dignity, Peace, Self-esteem, Independency, Health, Equity, Customs, Achievement and Love.  

After my baccalaureate in 2018, I benefited of from the scholarship named Bourse Jackie fully funded by Caravan to Class that serve to pay my private University in Bamako and the opportunity to learn English in Accra/Ghana for 3 months in 2019 and many other things. I will soon graduate from university both the private one where I am studying Logistic/Transport Management (night classes) and the public one where I am studying English language (morning classes).

This year I got the opportunity to participate in a program in the United States of America that was given to 4 young girl students from Mali by the U.S. Embassy fully funded by the U.S. Department of State based on Women’s Leadership (on Economic Empowerment) in the University of Delaware where I spent 5 weeks from the 25th of June to the 30th of July with other young women from five 5 other sub-Saharan countries.

We spent the whole five weeks learning, volunteering in some nonprofit organizations and visiting some other places different from Newark/Delaware where we were staying like: Dover, Wilmington, Maryland, Philadelphia, Washington DC, West Virginia/ Morgan Town and New York City. We were interacting all those activities together with our class sessions in which a specific lesson about women leadership, entrepreneurship and project management is supposed to be explained by a specific professor from the University of Delaware. During my stay I also got the opportunity to meet the two Senators of the state of Delaware (Senators Tom Carper and Chris Coons) with whom we spent enough time to have interactive discussions.

While my stay there I learned new things in the United states as: The proudness of citizens of being Americans.
The difference between American culture and the African one. Freedom of behave, speech and think freely.
 Citizens kindness/respect in the streets, shops and in the traffic. I love the Americans’ interest in new things (culture, people mindset and behavior).
 Their professionalism, punctuality, sociability and the cleanness of the place. Yet, the USA is very expensive comparing to my country.

My stay in the U.S. allowed me to gain many leadership skills and changed my way of perceiving things as a citizen, particularly about civic engagement and issues in economic development. It has somehow changed my way of thinking in general and it has motivated me to serve and improve my community by making it a better place to live.

Finally, my participation to this program made me realize the place of educated and emancipated women in a nation and the asset they naturally have in possession of being more successful to impact their community. For that I cannot thank Caravan to Class and its donors for this amazing opportunity which would not have come to me had I not been selected as a Bourse Jackie scholarship recipient.

Bintou Dicko, 2022