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Help one person, help the world William McDonald Middle School Grade 6 student says volunteering to build a school in Kenya was a life-changing experience
Candace Thomson
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, September 25, 2013
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Eleven-year-old Mia MacInnis stepped off a bus in Simotwet, Kenya, a year ago and saw a way of life that changed how she felt about her own.
Joanne, a nine-year-old girl from Simotwet, Kenya, left, met William McDonald Grade 6 student Mia MacInnis when a group of students from Yellowknife went to Kenya in March 2012. MacInnis and the other students attended the opening of Simotwet's first school. MacInnis helped with fundraising efforts to build the school and plans to continue fundraising this year. - photo courtesy of Dean MacInnis |
She and 13 other Yellowknife students went to Simotwet in the spring of 2012 to see the opening of a school they'd fundraised to help build. She'd witnessed the poverty before during a family trip to Africa when she was younger, she said, but the realization of how different her world was from others' went deeper this time.
"I'd travelled a bit so I kind of knew what the poverty was going to be like. It changed my mind and the way I thought because I have so much and I'm so lucky, and sometimes I don't realize that," the William McDonald School Grade 6 student told Yellowknifer on Monday.
"These kids were just so happy, and they had nothing," she said.
The level of poverty was an eye-opening experience for her and one she said she realizes not all people in developed countries get the chance to have.
"I think a lot know about it, they just don't really have that feeling in them that they're really lucky," she said. "I think they care but sometimes people don't really know how they can help them."
MacInnis said her father Dean, who is principal of Sir John Franklin High School, was an inspiration for her to begin volunteering.
The MacInnis family started fundraising in partnership with students from Sir John Franklin School earlier that year through dances, bake sales and with the help of Ontario-based charity A Better Life, which got them started on their goal to help children in Africa.
"We wanted to help children in Kenya so they can get to go to school because they don't have the same options as we do," she said. "And we have lots of things that they don't."
When she and the rest of the group got to the school there was a ribbon cutting ceremony, and people were cheering and handing them flowers, she said.
"They thought we just had the money to build the school, they didn't know we had to work for it to be built," she said. "So when we got there and told them ... I can't really describe it. Everyone was just so grateful and happy that they could have a school, because they had nothing really."
She and her sister, Ally, who was then 13 and in Grade 8 at J.H. Sissons School, took an extra step by getting their classmates to make booklets for the Kenyan students. The booklets were each addressed to an individual student and gave a portrayal of what a student's life in Canada was such as, what they liked doing in their free time, what their school was like, and about Yellowknife.
MacInnis said she would like to volunteer and help people in need that are a little closer to home by volunteering at places such as Yellowknife's day shelter.
"I just want to keep raising money for people because nothing's really perfect and everyone needs help ... if you help one person, you're changing the world," she said.
The MacInnis' and the group of students plan to continue fundraising this year for the school in Simotwet, as well.
"We're gonna fundraise this year and hopefully next year to add a kitchen or something to the school," MacInnis said. "For the next couple years we'll be adding on to the school, but after that we might try to make a different school somewhere else."
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