Entry: Charlie Feezel

Hi everyone,

I’m Charlie Feezel, the newest member of the World Cocoa Foundation team. I work on education programs and I wanted to tell you how I came to work in this field. It has a lot to do self help and empowerment. It’s the old saying about giving a man a fish. If you give a man a fish he will eat today but if you teach him to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime. His family will eat too and his community will be better for it.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to teach construction skills to people in Africa. I joined the U. S. Peace Corps and went to work at a trade school in Burundi. It was an amazing cultural experience and I found that being able to help others to empower themselves through knowledge and skills was far more rewarding than anything I had done before.

That was over twenty years ago. Today I still find the work as satisfying as ever and the need for knowledge and skills keeps growing. As the world becomes more of a global community the opportunity to deliver critical knowledge shows itself. These are opportunities we must respond to.

Why? The answer lies partly in how we all personally value education and know it’s the right thing. Since we are all members of this global community it is important to make sure all nations are as well educated as possible. We can then grow together and help each other make a better world for all.