Life lessons learned in Africa
Posted on 01. Sep, 2011 by I Have Hope in Claire, In The News, Natalie
By Jessica Lovell
Guelph Tribune
A group of teenagers gathers around a laptop in a local coffee shop. They attract the attention of the shop’s other patrons as the volume of their excited exclamations and laughter escalates. They are watching their own faces in footage gathered only days before in a place nearly halfway around the world.
“The whole trip was just one big highlight – of my life,” says Claire Teri, a Guelph Collegiate high school graduate who will begin studies at the University of Guelph in a couple of weeks.
She is reminiscing about the highs and lows of the three weeks she and 11 other local high school students spent in Lesotho, Africa.
The students were part of the Reach Lesotho project, which was developed with the aim of inspiring Canadian students to join the fight against AIDS.
The trip to Lesotho, where they were paired with a group of 12 African high school students, was the culmination of an 18-month-long education program. Their experiences will form the basis of a documentary that will be used to educate other young people.
“Young Canadians need to see a different image of the developing world,” says Abid Virani, one of the project organizers and the co-founder of I Have Hope in the Fight Against Aids, the organization behind the project.
The documentary is meant to present a hopeful image rather than a desperate one, to engage and empower youth and to show them the power of education, Virani explains.
The trip and the months leading up to the trip were meant to be an “experiential learning” process for the students, he says. It gave the students a chance to see the AIDS-ravaged country first-hand.
The students were chosen more for their leadership skills and their abilities to overcome challenges than for their academic standings, he says.
The goal was not to turn them into humanitarians, but just to encourage them to care and to think critically about the world, he says.
“The greatest part is that not all of them walked away thinking we changed the world,” says Virani. “It is imperative that they know that we tried.”
For Teri, the experience is still too fresh to be defined.“I don’t really know how to feel about it yet,” she says.
Upon returning home, she says she’s surprised how easily she has slipped back into life at home. “It almost feels like a dream,” she says of her time away.
Her fellow traveller, Centennial high school senior Natalie Sloof, expresses a similar sentiment. “I felt like someone had pressed pause and just thrown me back into my life,” says Sloof. “Nothing around me has changed, but I’ve changed.”
The students were particularly impressed by the sense of community they witnessed in Africa.
Some of the projects in which the students took part included painting a mural, a community tree-planting day, and a community restoration project in which they fixed up homes for elderly community members. The good deeds seemed to be contagious, says Sloof.
“We would start and other neighbours would come out and start helping,” she says.
At the same time, the Canadian students were disturbed by the level of ignorance they saw.
One quarter of people in Lesotho have HIV or AIDS, “but most of these kids have never had the chance to ask people questions about it,” says Teri, making the comparison between her own Canadian peer group and the high school students with which they were paired in Africa.
This was one of the negatives they saw, but it also showed them the positive impact that the education project could have, says Teri.
Though the trip definitely had its lows – Teri was attacked by a hungry dog, their accommodations were a little rough, and there was a bit of idle time as they waited for people who were consistently late – the overall experience was more good than bad.
For Sloof, it’s difficult to put the feeling into words. Instead, she tells the story of one of the big things that stuck out for her – the moment when the Canadian students finally met their African counterparts.
“That moment when we met them was like nothing else,” says Sloof. “These strangers from halfway across the world, they greeted us with hugs. That welcome – you don’t have that in North America.”
The documentary of their experiences is set to premier at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto on Dec. 1 – World AIDS Day. A date and time for a local screening of the film has yet to be set.
The students are hoping the film is as inspiring for other young people as the experience was for them.
“I want to reach out to youth here just to show them that they can make a change in someone’s life, even if it’s just a random act of kindness,” says Sloof.
