Most Brown students spend time studying in the library.
But few actually build one. This past summer, Kofi-Charu Turner '99 renovated a site in Komenda, Ghana in order to create a library for the students to use there. I was teaching there, and they didn't have any books. When Turner returned to Brown as a junior, he was awarded the prestigious Royce Fellowship, which provided him with the funding to go back to Ghana this past summer in order to work on a temporary site for the library. Turner is the organization's president, CEO, and founder, while his best friend from high school, Princeton senior Hersh Davis-Nitzberg, is the organization's vice president.