May 2, 2012

LOUDONVILLE -- Meghan Yi and Julie Juchno, both Siena athletes, spent seven weeks last summer in Namibia, Africa, teaching math and English in an afterschool program.

There they met a 7th-grade boy named Alfredo, who was breezing through the woefully unproductive school system despite not even knowing the alphabet, let alone how to read.

Yi, a cross country runner, and Juchno, a golfer, quickly came to understand that Alfredo's illiteracy was a failure of adults, not a boy who badly wanted to learn.

So they taught him the alphabet, helping him sound out words letter by letter until he understood sentences and then even stories. By the end of seven weeks, Yi and Juchno had helped Alfredo produce a book report on a Disney version of "The Sorcerer's Stone."

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