The Year of the Poet X August 2023 - The Year of the Poet: Poets Create Bridges of Cultural Understanding Poetry

Foreword
Children: Difference Makers
Kelvin Doe

Living in a very poor area of Freetown in the civil war-torn Sierra Leone, Kelvin Doe was faced with unreliable supply of electricity, frequent power failures and many other hardships. Encountered with these challenges he displayed an incredible ability to adapt and to create electronic items from scrap to overcome these difficulties. Rather than getting disheartened he inspired himself to build his own devices and to help alleviate the predicaments of his community.

Kelvin Doe was born October 26, 1996, in the capital city of Freetown. He is the youngest of five children. At the tender age of 10, he would retrieve discarded electronics and other scrapped items from junkyards after school. He would disassemble these objects to figure out how they worked. He would reassemble these pieces to create his own contraptions. His mother would often come home to find their living room looking like an electronic scrapyard.

He is known for teaching himself engineering at the age of 12 and building his own radio station in Sierra Leone, where he played music and broadcasted news under the name "DJ Focus." He was one of the finalists in GMin's Innovate Salone idea competition, in which he built a generator from scrap metals. He would constantly use discarded pieces of scrap electronics to build transmitters, generators, and batteries.

As a result of his accomplishment, he received an invitation to the United States and subsequently became the youngest person to participate in the "Visiting Practitioner's Program" at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Kelvin Doe was a speaker at TEDxTeen and lectured to undergraduate engineering students at Harvard College. In May 2013, he signed a $100,000 solar project pact with Canadian High-Speed Service Provider Sierra WiFi.

He has become a role model for the youth in his country. They follow and emulate him to succeed in their lives. He has also been able to speak to young people in Africa on different platforms. He has become an example of self-teaching and learning.

In 2016, Kelvin Doe became an Honorary Board member of Emergency USA, an organization with a mission to provide free medical and surgical care to war victims and poverty victims. Kelvin has become one of the most respected of young African inventors in the world. He says openly that everything he learns he will share with his friends, family, and community.

Ashok K. Bhargava
President, Writers International Network
Vancouver, Canada