Jared is currently working as a Research Assistant for SolarSPELL while pursuing his Master’s in Global Technology & Development as a Coverdell Fellow. Jared was a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) for two years in Micronesia where he taught English and Marine Science at a local elementary school. He was also a part of one of the first PCV cohorts to be provided with a SolarSPELL to be utilized in the schools. In December 2019, Jared traveled to the opposite side of the globe–Comoros–with the SolarSPELL team to assist with training and conduct interviews with Peace Corps Volunteers and local teachers using the SolarSPELL digital libraries.
When Jared was in Comoros, he met a community member who inspired him. He says, “Their language trainer was a guy that was probably my age, in his early thirties. His name is Miftah. This guy was so intelligent, he was so good at all of the languages spoken there: Arabic, French, Comorian, on top of his English skills. The guy’s a superstar. He does a lot of work with the Peace Corps, but what he does with the SolarSPELL is amazing. There’s an American Center that he does SolarSPELL teaching at and he goes into his village a couple nights a week with people in his community that dropped out or are too old for school and uses the SolarSPELL to teach them. If you go into his classroom you would see a broken concrete hut with a dangling broken light bulb, and he’s in there a couple nights a week, just trying to help the people in his village get a little better educated. That really stood out for me.”
