Earlier this year, Albert Tang (唐樺岳), a 17-year-old student at National Changhua Senior High School (國立彰化高級中學), traveled to Swaziland as a volunteer for 10 days to teach children computer skills. What he saw on that trip changed him profoundly.
“I had worked with poor people in Taiwan,” he said in a phone interview on Sunday, “but what I saw in Swaziland was a totally different type of poverty.”
He said he now finds racial prejudice totally unacceptable. “I try to explain what I experienced, and they [his contemporaries] have stopped making jokes [about black people],” he said.
Tang was part of a group of Taiwanese students from Changhua Senior High School who visited the kingdom with Lewis Lu (呂興忠), the school’s library director and the chief organizer of the Change the World: International High School Youth Volunteers Conference (青年志工的夢想與實踐), which is being held at the school this week as the main event of the International Globalization Conference for High School Students on Intercultural Understanding (2008國際高中青年文化會議).
The event was organized to coincide with International Volunteer Day, which falls on Friday, and aims to encourage young people from prosperous nations to step out of their comfort zones. Janine Maxwell, the founder of Heart for Africa, an organization that works extensively with orphans in Africa, met Lu while in Swaziland this year and has been invited as a keynote speaker for the conference.
Maxwell, whose own commitment to aid work in Africa came relatively late, runs a program in which American high school kids interested in volunteer work are given a chance to experience hands-on aid work in Africa. Before launching Heart for Africa, Maxwell led the Onyx Marketing Group, a major PR company in Canada. A meeting with a street kid in Lusaka during a trip to Zambia changed all that. She wanted to help: “I felt that this was my mission in life. I am here to rescue this child and being a businessperson and having influence and wealth I can fix this, because I was arrogant and didn’t know any better. ... I will fix this, then I can go back home, to my business, my life, my family and the world will be good. But [the situation] is not fixable.”
As she learned more about the vicious cycle of poverty and disease that leaves millions of kids fending for themselves on the streets of cities such as Lusaka and Nairobi, Maxwell’s Christian faith prompted her to dedicate her time, energy and business acumen to helping those less fortunate than herself. A major part of this process is bringing people to Africa to see the reality on the ground, giving them a transformative experience that motivates them to do something about the situation, in the way that her own meeting with one child on the streets of Lusaka changed her life.
Maxwell estimates that Heart for Africa has brought over 4,000 people to Swaziland and Kenya over the past four years, mostly on short stays of around 10 days, but some for as long as a month. Volunteers are given simple tasks such as planting vegetable gardens, setting up fences and building shelters.
“The kids are real work horses,” Maxwell said. “That’s the beauty about having a bunch of young, strong backs out there ... They are working side-by-side [with the local people], Africans and North Americans. It was really good for the Africans to see the Americans get dirty, because historically we white folk have gone in and said ‘that’s how you do it.’
“Many [of the people we take over] are quite fearful. I would say that 75 percent of the people who travel with us have never had a passport, so these are not world travelers. These may be people who have never left their own state, but it is like they are hearing a call in the heart. This is not a mental choice for most people, it’s a heart call. They say, ‘I do have a lot, I have more than I need.’”
For Tang, although he didn’t get muddy digging holes for fence posts, he experienced his own revelations. “We had gone intending to teach them about using the Internet,” he said, “but when we got there, we found there wasn’t any Internet connection. That totally messed up our plans.”
Discovering how other people live is the first step to making a difference. The title of the conference is Change the World, and while many of the students, in essays submitted as part of their application to participate in the conference, see their role as benevolent helpers to those in need, Rachel Smoltz, 14, from King’s Ridge Christian High School, Georgia, who was with Maxwell in Swaziland this summer, saw things a little differently.
“First of all, when I traveled to Africa I thought I would be the one teaching them about education, and about God’s love and showing them love and being there for them. And I was really surprised because I felt that I didn’t really teach them a lot, but they changed my life. When I got back to America it felt like they had changed me much more than I had changed them,” Smoltz said.
“I would feel wrong if I went over there and saw what was happening and saw the pain and the suffering and came back and did nothing,” said Maggie Taylor, 17, of North Forsyth High School, Georgia, who has volunteered in Kenya three times and in Swaziland once, and is active in fund-raising for African aid.
Maxwell said the group has had enormous success with many first time travelers, who after the initial trip want to renew their commitment. “We have had a great response,” Maxwell said, “to the extent that we are the bottleneck. We have a lot of people who want to volunteer long term, but we are not set up for that yet ... Many people will come back and start fund-raising for projects once they have gone and seen the need.”
The 2008 Change the World: International High School Volunteers Conference opened yesterday. Maxwell was the keynote speaker. The event brings together 35 students from 10 schools in seven countries, all of whom have participated in volunteer work. The conference runs until Dec. 7.
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