 |
|
|
|
|
   
|
South Africa trip focuses on schools Sarah Ferguson Northern News Services Published Friday, July 22, 2011
The 12 students from grades 9 to 11 all belong to a service club called Interact (International Action), and they travelled together to Soweto, South Africa, on June 25 for three weeks to learn about African culture and offer volunteer aid. Susan Huvenaars, a guidance counsellor at St. Pat's, said the club formed three years ago and is, "like a rotary club for high school students." "Like the Rotary club, Interact is founded on being of service to others," she said. According to Huvenaars, the trip took more than a year to plan and required a lot of fundraising. She says the entire endeavour cost about $70,000 - just over $5,000 per person - and owes its success to an impressive fundraising effort by the students, along with support from the community. "Because of the generous donations from the Union of Northern Workers, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Yellowknife Rotary Club and others, and previous fundraising monies we had prior to planning our trip, the cost for each student was reduced to about $4,765 each - (and) chaperons raised their own funds," said Huvenaars. "Also, several students got part-time jobs, home-based salespeople donated their sales commissions to students, and many businesses were very generous in making donations to raffle-tickets sales and silent auction items," she continued. "Several families also gave us monetary donations. "We were very grateful for the support." Huvenaars said the idea for the trip started with "an innocent email." "I was talking with former Yellowknife Catholic Schools superintendent Kern Von Hagen and his wife, Leah, who moved to Soweto a while ago," she explained. "I was asking about their lives in South Africa when we came up with the idea of planning an educational trip to Africa for the students." During their trip, students learned more about African life than they thought possible. They'd already been hearing a lot since South Africa played host to the FIFA soccer World Cup last year. "I thought that because South Africa hosted the World Cup that it was going to be a wealthy country," said Tiffany Thrasher. "The World Cup helped the economy there, but poverty is still an issue in South Africa - it's not gone yet." Thrasher smiled as she recalled spending time with a number of young African children while helping to paint a school. "Many of the kids had matted hair and dirty clothes, but the thing that stood out for me the most was the fact that all of them were always smiling," she said. "And they followed me around for the whole time I was there." Juliana Neudorf said the trip to Africa was "not your average field trip." "It was so different from what we are used to," she said. "We didn't just sit on a bus and drive around - we actually stayed with South African families and learned about their lives and culture. "There was no running water and no stove in the houses." Aside from the excitement of travelling to a foreign country and "getting out of our comfort zones," as Huvenaars puts it, there were several goals that the students managed to accomplish during the trip. They included enhancing the lives of rural school children and orphans in the area by providing educational supplies, healthy food as well as helping out at a number of schools. Besides painting a school, they also helped fix up a Soweto creche, or nursery school. Finally, Huvenaars said the students from the St. Pat's Interact Club also worked on developing a long-term relationship with the students at another school: a private school called Grantleigh located near Soweto. "It is our hope that students from Grantleigh will come to Yellowknife in December 2012," she said. "They are very excited about the possibility. "We have returned changed people - the students have a new sense of humility and gratitude for what they have in their lives."
|
