DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.

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I'm Doug Johnson.

This week we play new music from Taylor Swift ...

And, answer a question about Veterans Day ...

But first, a report on a group that has built hundreds of playgrounds in America and how it is now reaching beyond those borders.

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KaBOOM

DOUG JOHNSON: Back in nineteen ninety-five, Darrell Hammond read a tragic story in the newspaper about two children in a poor area of Washington, D.C. They had been playing in an old car because they had nowhere else to play. They got stuck inside and died from a lack of air.

Mr. Hammond was struck by the tragedy. Soon after, he and his friend Dawn Hutchinson established a non-profit group to build community playgrounds across America. The first went up that same year in Washington. In the fifteen years since, KaBOOM has built almost two thousand community playgrounds. But KaBOOM's playground plans are not just for America. Faith Lapidus has more.

FAITH LAPIDUS: Mark White built his first non-American playground in Poland. He is known in that country as "Pan Plac Zabaw" or Mr. Playground. The project took place at an orphanage, a large housing center for children without parents. Mark White says the playground brought the wider community together. Families came to play. Orphaned children made friends with children they had never had the chance to play with before.

Mark White's earlier work with KaBOOM in the American Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina helped inspire and guide the playground in Poland.

MARK WHITE: "I thought couldn't this playground model work elsewhere in the world? With Skype, and the Internet and cell phones? Couldn't we do the same type of thing? So I looked at the eight steps of the roadmap that KaBOOM uses to teach people how to build a playground, using community involvement. And went one by one and planned the playground there in Poland."

Currently, Mark White is working on a playground in Nepal. That is the kind of story sure to make Laurence Hooper happy. He is Senior Director of Online Initiatives at KaBoom. He takes everything KaBOOM knows about building playgrounds and puts that information online in a simple, easy-to-use design.

He says there are fifteen years of playground-building knowledge available on KaBOOM's website. He says you can find checklists, design plans, even information about soil testing. Mr. Hooper also says visitors can post questions that KaBOOM experts will answer. Or visitors can exchange information with other playground builders, no matter where they are.

LAURENCE HOOPER: "It's astonishing. You hear stories about people using our tools in Nepal or in Africa. The power of the web is that it really does reach into every single corner and makes this knowledge available to someone who just goes onto a search engine and types a couple of words looking for this information. You know, they will find us."