West Kildonan Students Travel to South Africa to Help

By Tom Schmidt

For the past two years, students at West Kildonan Collegiate have been involved in an HIV/AIDS awareness and fundraising project. Our school has been participating in an on-line environmental program called ENO, for the past five years. Most of the environmental, cultural, and human rights activities are done on-line, but there is a conference every two years to bring participants face to face. In October of 2004 we had the opportunity to attend this conference in South Africa.

We made several presentations dealing with environmental problems and solutions in Canada. On cultural night we performed musical numbers and shared stories about our country. Besides the formal conference, students did a number of community and nature activities including game park visits, tours of local factories and farms, and a visit to a local AIDS orphan house, Othandweni (the place where there is love). Before leaving for the conference, we raised over $650 at our school. We presented the money to the orphan house during our visit.

The philosophy behind the orphan houses, which are all over the country, is to provide a home environment with a housemother instead of institutionalizing the children. The hope is that, with a stable home and solid education, they will stay in the township and help to improve conditions for the community.

When we returned to Johannesburg to catch our plane, we had time to tour SOWETO and meet some of its wonderful people. We visited Nelson Mandela's house, the Hector Peterson Memorial, and the Apartheid Museum. Students also got a glimpse of the grinding poverty that still plagues blacks when we visited a shantytown. Political apartheid may have ended, but economic apartheid is a grim reality.

This trip has been a life-changing experience for my students. Not only have they seen how others in the world live, but they have returned to Canada and continued to fundraise and conduct workshops about HIV/AIDS awareness in our school and community. We also produced a short video of the experience to help others put a face to this international problem. Students appeared on CBC radio, Shaw Cable, and in an article in the Free Press. A local Doctor, Colin Foster, saw the students and to date has helped us fundraise both personally and through his friends and colleagues. As of November 2005, we have sent the orphan house over $6000.

My ENO students also help organize and run an annual youth conference at Menno Simons College at the U of W. This year they will facilitate an HIV/AIDS workshop with high school students.

Leah Budzinski, one of the participants, sums up her feelings about this experience in this way. “While in Africa, we saw some amazing scenery, and animals, but the things I will remember most about the trip are the people and the way they lived.”

We visited an AIDS orphan house where five children lived whose parents had all died from the disease. There were six people living in a tiny house with a foster mother to care for them. In addition to our large cash donation from our fundraising, we brought the children games, crayons, and colouring books. I will never forget the laughter and the smiles on the children’s faces.

We also visited a glass factory, which employed mostly black people. They were forced to work in horribly ventilated rooms right next to huge furnaces with very little protection between themselves and the flames. They worked for little money and still had to raise a family. If that glass factory were in Canada it would most certainly be shut down. Our visit gave us a glimpse into the working conditions for some people in South Africa.

We also drove by many townships that for far as the eye could see were tiny houses made of sheet metal and wood. Most had no doors and had old tires and heavy pieces of junk on the roofs to keep them from blowing away. People washed their clothes at wells outside their houses, and there were chickens and goats roaming freely.

After returning from this trip, I realized just how lucky I was to be living in a place that has hot water and heating. It made me appreciate what we have much more than before I went to Africa. I don’t take things for granted like I used to because there are a lot of people living in this world that have almost nothing.