Oprah Opens Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls school in South Africa
"I Wanted to Take Girls With That 'It' Quality and Give Them the Opportunity to Make a Difference in the World"
Oprah Winfrey has spent five years and $40 million building the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls school in South Africa for impoverished teenagers. Built to Oprahlicious specifications, the school is situated on 22 lush acres and includes 28 buildings with oversize rooms, 200-thread-count sheets, a yoga studio, beauty salon, indoor and outdoor theaters, hundreds of pieces of original tribal art and sidewalks speckled with colorful tiles. "I understand that many in the school system and out feel that I'm going overboard, and that's fine. This is what I want to do. I wanted to take girls with that 'It' quality, and give them an opportunity to make a difference in the world," she tells National Correspondent Allison Samuels in Newsweek's January 8, 2007 issue (on newsstands Monday, January 1). "I'd like to think I have as much good sense as I have money, so that's a lot of good sense."
Samuels, who spent several days with Oprah at the school site in South Africa, reports that Oprah decided to build her own school because she was tired of charity from a distance. "When I first started making a lot of money," Oprah tells Newsweek, "I really became frustrated with the fact that all I did was write check after check to this or that charity without really feeling like it was a part of me. At a certain point, you want to feel that connection."
Oprah also knows that some people will complain that charity should begin at home, even though she has provided millions of dollars to educate poor children in the United States, especially via her Oprah Winfrey Scholars Program, Samuels reports. But she sees the two situations as entirely different. "Say what you will about the American educational system -- it does work," Oprah tells Newsweek. "If you are a child in the United States, you can get an education." And she doesn't think that American students -- who, unlike Africans, go to school free of charge -- appreciate what they have. "I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there," she says. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."
More than 3,500 girls applied for 152 spots -- and Oprah interviewed all of the 500 finalists herself. There were so many heartbreaking stories -- one in eight South Africans are HIV-positive -- that Oprah finally stopped asking girls about their backgrounds. She had to do something very un-Oprah-like: she buried her emotions. "If I didn't find a way to separate my feelings, I'd have been crying the entire month I was in Africa," she tells Newsweek. "I see myself in all these girls -- the struggles and the hardships that just seem unbearable," she says. "I have nothing but respect for them. I can't understand how someone who's been there can't want to reach back and do something." Oprah calls the school "the fulfillment of my work on earth."
