A community service project funding education for children in need in India & Bangladesh
THE BACKSTORY
We have been friends at Chiang Mai International School for almost ten years - a friendship built on a shared love of sports, a North American heritage and gaming and gaming and also, gaming! We both have a pretty privileged life living as expat kids in the Kingdom of Thailand. Our parents kept reminding us of how good we had it and that we should appreciate it.
To help us further along our journey to appreciating our good fortune, Sam's Dad, John (who is the regional director for a UK-based NGO) invited us to go on one of his work trips during school break to help open our eyes and get a sense of some the contrasting realities in this world. Our parents all agreed this was a great idea and the plan was also hatched to try and use this experience to earn more hours towards our community service requirements that we needed to graduate from high school. The plans were set for our Dads and the two of us to all go together to India and Bangladesh in June 2023 and check out some of Sam,'s Dad's projects in June 2023. The school agreed to let us earn some community service hours for the experience as long as we
hen we came back to school we shared our experience with our classmates. Easy-peezy...plus, we'd get a trip out of the deal! Little did we realize that the trip would be so much more than just that.
That first trip in June 2023 was an eye-opening experience to say the least. We visited Patna, India and Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, including visiting the Rohingya refugee camps near the Burmese border - the world's largest refugee camp with over one million residents. We visited almost 20 schools over 5 days. Some of these schools were in rural areas and some were urban. One was under a bridge. Another one was in an urban slum littered with garbage and open sewage. These schools were established by Sam's Dad's NGO and the students (who were lucky enough to attend these schools) were also supported by the NGO too, since the $80 cost per year to attend was way too much for the average family to afford in these very poor areas. We also learned that the reason why Sam's Dad's NGO focuses on helping children get an education is because there seems to be a relationship between the more years of education people get then the greater likelihood they can escape poverty - all for just $80.
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After that intense trip and over the next few weeks back in Thailand we digested that experience and kept thinking about that magic $80 number - the cost for each kid to have a chance to go to school and get an education. Could we raise $80? Could we raise $160? Could we raise $800? We thought about bake sales at school? Selling t-shirts and other things at school events.
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After speaking with our Dad's and learning about the idea of tax-deductible giving and charities, we learned that millions of people around the world donate money to charities that are non-profit and that the government will extend a tax benefit for this support so it basically would cost a donor far less than $80 to donate $80...and send one kid to school. From that realization and after discovering that we could instruct anyone interested in donating to make their donation directly to Sam's Dad's NGO, we knew we had a real project that would not only give us more community service hours but something we could possibly grow and really make a difference. Shortly after we drew up a list of people who would be possible donors comprised of our parents, uncles, aunts, friends of our parents and neighbors.
Fast forward to today: so far to date we have managed to receive pledges totaling over US$1700 which is enough funds to send 21 kids to school for a year. Our goal is to reach $3000 by the end of the year which would be enough funds to send almost 40 kids to school for a year.