MY HERO Team Joins iEARN Conference in Morocco

CONTACT: Wendy Milette                                                              FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The MY HERO Project
[email protected]
949-376-5964

MY HERO Team Joins iEARN Conference in Morocco

LAGUNA BEACH, CA – 07/17/17 - MY HERO team members Cheikh Darou Seck and Mohamed Sidibay are in Marrakech, Morocco, this week for the 2017 iEARN Conference and Youth Summit. The annual conference spans from July 17 – 22, 2017, and showcases the latest in educational technology, development tools and emerging curricula. The six-day event also features school partnerships and collaborations between educators and young people participating in the iEARN network.

Cheikh Darou SeckMohamed Sidibay - keynote speaker at the 2017 iEARN Conference in MoroccoMohamed Sidibay is a keynote speaker and Global Youth Ambassador at the conference. A former child soldier in Sierra Leone, Sidibay sought asylum in the United States at age 12. For nearly two decades, Sidibay has worked as a human rights activist as well as a spokesperson for MY HERO. “Like with the MY HERO Project, I grew up with iEARN,” says Sidibay. “When everything else was lost, iEARN became the only thing I had to looked forward to every day when I was in Sierra Leone.”

Sidibay says iEARN is where he learned about the power of connectivity. “Eleven years later, this organization still plays an intricate part in my development as an educator and a human rights activist,” he says. “Attending my third iEARN conference, is a way of continuing to build a bond with an organization that first opened my eyes to the world. I cannot wait to be in the company of people
 who believe in the power of education in changing lives.”

Cheikh Darou Seck, My Hero’s site administrator in Senegal, will serve as a panelist at the conference. This is Seck’s fifth iEARN Conference. The 2004 conference in Slovakia is where Seck first met the MY HERO team. “Then this wonderful project become a second family for me,” he says. “They trained me and helped me grow personally and professionally.” 

“It's been an amazing journey of 13 years,” says Seck. “It has taken me from West Africa and the desert sands of Qatar and Morocco to California where I learned to be a better educator and to help students and other teachers become aware of Global issues.”

Seck says iEARN is a place to “meet good friends to have some good time, exchange practices and share some good jokes,” but it’s also a place that can challenge your beliefs about people and places around the world.

  “iEARN is the best thing that can happen to an educator who happens to be out for a change,” he says. “iEARN has been a great opportunity for me to learn how to do things differently and to see the world other than from the poor perspective that most African people have, which is only thinking of what to get from the others not what you can give to them, what you can bring to them.”

“From the first iEARN conference I attended in Slovakia, while representing the MY HERO Project, I knew we had been introduced to an amazing global online education community,” says Wendy Jewell, Director of MY HERO Global Learning Circles. “The workshop introduced me to a way to bring the world into the classroom. It gave birth to the MY HERO Global Learning Circles. The diversity of cultures, food, music, new friends, ideas and heroes, has been such a gift."