When I last wrote about Katie Marocci, she was a recent high school graduate who was working at a small Ghanaian school on a six month volunteer opportunity.

"After being here in Africa for a few months,” she wrote in an email, “I have learned many things. I’ve realized that in life all you need is your family (whether it’s your actual family or your family of friends), God, and love. Without those three things, no one could survive here."

As you can tell from that statement, Katie was mature for her age (just turned 18) but now that she’s 20, she understands why her parents worried about her leaving for Africa on her own when she was so young.

During that time the people, the students and the teachers captured her heart and she kept her friends up to date with her adventures on a regular basis.

When she shared her dream of building a library for her Ghanaian school, the student council at her old school began to organize a series of fundraisers.

By the time she left Ghana, her friends had raised enough money for her to begin to renovate an old, unused, three walled classroom with the help of local people who did most of the construction. The forth wall was built and the inside walls were plastered and painted.

Once Katie arrived home, she and her volunteer partner, Evelyn from Scotland, began doing more fundraising and collecting books for the library. Fifteen months later, they were on their way back to complete the project. Shelves and chairs were built and painted and walls and windows washed and scrubbed in preparation for the opening celebration – Job done.

Obviously the Ghanaian students gained a lot from Katie’s efforts but what about her?

“First of all,” she told me, “every day I got to do something semi important [Most of us would say very important] … It’s not really about the library being built,” she continued, “it’s about the relationships I developed with people there. I also became more self-confident. Now I know when I put my mind to it, I can do anything. I’m only 20 and I’ve built a library, so why not build another one?”

Today Katie is studying Global Studies at Malaspina University-College and she’s planning on working for the United Nations or an NGO when she graduates unless she starts her own NGO.

Is this something any young person could do, or do you have to be special, I asked.

Anyone can do it, Katie says. First get a rough idea of what you would like to do. Then consistently spend 20 minutes a day researching on the Internet or in books, and every opportunity you get, network with anyone and everyone that has similar interests.

I suspect a lot of today’s young people are doing just that and they too, like Katie, will end up doing something “semi important”. On the whole today’s teenagers are amazing. They really are.