GivingTracker| Shakira is one of our muses here at Anne of Carversville, a quintessential Smart Sensuality woman: smart, sexy and with heart. A constant activist for the poor and underprivileged, Shakira walks her talk in word and deed.

Shakira was in Haiti on Thursday, celebrating the upcoming renovation of a historic Catholic girls school, severely damaged in the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Shakira always gets down with the people. In Haiti, with her song ‘Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) setting the mood, Shakira grooved with students from Port-au-Prince’s Elie Dubois high school.

‘I’m convinced that the key to a dignified future for Haiti is through education,’ said Shakira.

Shakira’s Barefoot Foundation donated an amazing $400,000, matched by the Inter-American Development Bank, to restore the high school. Reconstruction of the nine-classroom, 250-student school will hopefully begin in two months and will take about 14 months to complete.

It is expensive to reconstruct the school because everything must be imported, said project manager Eric Cesal of Architecture for Humanity. As a special gesture, students — many of them still living in tents more than a year after their own earthquake — folded paper cranes in support of students in earthquake and tsunami-ravaged Sendai, Japan.