FINDING THE NEXT KATHERINE JOHNSON

The children of Aseema held their Annual Education Fair, including science exhibits.  These are the children Friends of Aseema is trying to help. They live in sprawling, poverty-stricken areas of Mumbai. Thanks to the Aseema Charitable Trust, thousands are receiving high-quality education and going on to college and to obtaining good jobs.

In the U.S., Katherine Johnson passed away at the age of 101. Like the Aseema children, Katherine was born into a family of meager finances and into a society that turned away from her.

Katherine was born in 1918 and grew up in a part of West Virginia where no schools would admit African-American children like her. Her father had only a sixth-grade education and worked as a farmer and janitor. He had a natural talent for mathematics but no means to express it. He saw that same talent in his daughter, so he moved to a town with a school that would accept her and went to work in a hotel for $100 a month—which is only $1,360 a month in today’s income—to support himself, his wife, Katherine and her siblings.

Katherine went to college where she encountered a particularly caring mentor and teacher named Schieffelin Claytor, who guided her in her study of mathematical research. She went on to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA. There, she met astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn. In those days, computers were new and not trusted. Katherine Johnson hand-calculated the trajectories for these astronauts’ pioneering flights, which included allowances for the intricacies of the earth’s rotation and the varying positions of the moon. Years later, her mathematical advances helped get the Apollo 13 crew back home safely after they experienced an emergency in space and had to abort the mission.

Katherine’s father could have resigned himself to living in poverty and discrimination.  But he didn’t.  Katherine could have grown up in hardship in a life of low-wage work and hidden talent.  But she didn’t.

Schieffelin Claytor could have decided that the odds were too stacked against Katherine, being a woman and African-American, and not given her so much time and attention.  But he didn’t.

The children living in poverty in Mumbai could be consigned to a life focused on subsistence earnings, like trying to sell balloons to taxi passengers at a traffic light. We could turn away. But Aseema did not, and Friends of Aseema is not. Don’t turn away. Among these children are future teachers, scientists, artists. Your donation to Friends of Aseema will help raise children and their families out of poverty through education to give society their gifts like Katherine Johnson. Take a good look at these photos.  Is one of these kids the next Katherine Johnson?  Can you help him or her reach the moon?  Or Mars?  Or the stars?

Go to www.friendsofaseema.org to learn more and donate.