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.
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
No one saw it coming. Everyone — including the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — expected at least some of the recall campaigns against 24 of its lawmakers and Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) to succeed. Underground gamblers reportedly expected between five and eight lawmakers to lose their jobs. All of this analysis made sense, but contained a fatal flaw. The record of the recall campaigns, the collapse of the KMT-led recalls, and polling data all pointed to enthusiastic high turnout in support of the recall campaigns, and that those against the recalls were unenthusiastic and far less likely to vote. That
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
RSS