The host of The Oprah Winfrey Show opened a school Tuesday for disadvantaged girls, fulfilling a promise she made to former President Nelson Mandela six years ago and because she was tired of charity from a distance.
"When I first started making a lot of money," Oprah says, "I really became frustrated with the fact that all I did was write check after check to this or that charity without really feeling like it was a part of me. At a certain point, you want to feel that connection."
Oprah Winfrey says she built a school for poor girls in South Africa because she wanted to feel closer to the people she was trying to help: "I wanted to give this opportunity to girls who had a light so bright that not even poverty could dim that light".
She spent five years and $40 million to build the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls to her own Oprahlicious specifications. The school who is located outside of Johannesburg aims to give 152 girls from deprived backgrounds a quality education in a country where schools are struggling to overcome the legacy of apartheid.
Nelson Mandela said: "This is a lady that has, despite her own disadvantaged background, become one of the benefactors of the disadvantaged throughout the world and we should congratulate her for that".
"These girls deserve to be surrounded by beauty, and beauty does inspire," she told . "I wanted this to be a place of honor for them because these girls have never been treated with kindness. They've never been told they are pretty or have wonderful dimples. I wanted to hear those things as a child."
Oprah calls the school "the fulfillment of my work on earth."
Oprah Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American multiple-Emmy Award winning host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest rated talk show in television history. She is also an influential book critic, an Academy Award-nominated actress, and a magazine publisher. According to Forbes magazine, she was the richest African American of the 20th century and the world's only Black billionaire for three straight years. Life magazine has ranked her as the most influential woman of her generation and Time magazine as one of only four people to have shaped both the 20th century and the early 21st. In 2005, Business Week ranked her as the greatest Black philanthropist in American history. Wikipedia
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