On Saturday, Sept. 13, all 1,100 Phillips Academy students, along with faculty, staff, parents and alumni will take part in the second annual Non Sibi Day, a worldwide day of service, launched in September 2007.
Roughly 2,000 members of the extended PA community — from Africa to Hong Kong to Lawrence and Andover — devoted a good portion of their day to last year's inaugural effort.
This year, organizers at the school are expecting similar numbers and have more than 60 projects lined up and ready to go worldwide. Nineteen work sites will dot the Merrimack Valley, with five projects planned for the town of Andover.
They will include an effort organized by Phillips Academy's new instructor in Arabic, Mohammed Harba, who is running a drive to collect school supplies and sports equipment for schools in poor neighborhoods in Hillah, Iraq, the capital of Babylon Province.
Harba is looking to the Andover and other local communities for donations of supplies, which can be dropped off at the mailroom on the lower floor of George Washington Hall on Chapel Ave. He will lead a group of volunteers who will write letters to the students in Iraq, then package the supplies for shipment to Hillah.
Harba emigrated from Iraq where he had worked extensively with the U.S. military, one of whom was 1997 Phillips Academy graduate Seth Moulton, now a Marine Corps captain. Through Moulton and by way of a Fulbright Scholarship, which he won in 2005, Harba found his way to Andover last spring, and began teaching Arabic as part of the academy's extensive foreign language program.
Other Andover-based Non Sibi Day projects include "Room to Grow" where volunteers will make fleece blankets for infants and children in need, trail maintenance for AVIS, and visits and social activities at Academy Manor nursing home
