University of Alberta public health student Azalea Lehndorff rebelled against her parents to get an education and pushed for youth in Afghanistan to have the same opportunity.

Forbidden to go to school by her parents, Lehndorff found inspiration in the books her father sold to Amish and Mennonites. Among the pages were biographies of history’s giants and, inspired by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, she fled home to go to school when she was 14-year-old.

“When I went to high school and sat in a classroom I was terrified,” she said. “I remember typing my first paper and I could only type 13 words per minute.”

Having never visited Afghanistan, she reached out to the humanitarian organization A Better World to create the “100 Classroom Project.”

The project just launched a campaign for a sixth girls school with a goal of 1,000 people donating $100 within 100 days. The first 100 donations will be matched.

While Lehndorff was born in Massachusetts, she moved 26 times to 11 states, partly due to her mother’s paranoia-related mental illness.

As part of the illness, Lehndroff’s mother wanted to keep her sisters away from school. She grew up in the foster system and doesn’t have faith in the education system.

In Grade 7, her schooling fell apart and her mother told her she could quit school at Grade 8, which sounded like a good idea at the time.

Then, she looked to her past to find her dreams for the future — her grandpa was an anesthesiologist, motivating her to go to school for public health.

The idea for 100 Classrooms project came while doing her undergraduate degree, working 180 hours per month.

“I’m telling you, I don’t even know how I passed,” she said.

She reflected on her upcoming graduation and how the education stream was unavailable to her for so long. Remembering everyone who had helped her along the way, she wanted to do the same for the people of Afghanistan.

“We have this perception about them that they are all against education and they’re all extremists, when really it’s a small percentage of the population,” she said.

In Afghanistan, Lehndorff said, people are used to receiving money from government and large organizations, so when individuals take action it builds good will.

Two of the schools built through the project have had the first class of Grade 12 girls graduate.

“I want to see the futures that those girls want,” she said. “They want to go to university. They want to have a career of some sort.”

To donate visit www.a-better-world.ca.

catherine.griwkowsky@sunmedia.ca

@SunGriwkowskyC