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Inspiring change in the community

A summer volunteering experience was life-changing for one Okotoks teen.
Gabby Gibbs recently returned from a youth volunteer trip to Antri, India with ME to WE: Free the Children, where she helped to build two classrooms and a washroom facility
Gabby Gibbs recently returned from a youth volunteer trip to Antri, India with ME to WE: Free the Children, where she helped to build two classrooms and a washroom facility in the village’ s school. She hopes to use her experience to inspire others to volunteers and help those in need, at home or worldwide.

A summer volunteering experience was life-changing for one Okotoks teen.

Gabby Gibbs, now a Grade 12 student at Holy Trinity Academy, spent three weeks in the small village of Antri, India in August with non-governmental organization ME to WE: Free the Children. She travelled with 14 youth from across North America, including 2015 Foothills Composite School graduate Megan Coutts.

Free the Children bases its international work on five pillars: education, healthcare, clean water and sanitation, food security, and income and opportunity. In Antri, the focus was primarily on education.

“The community we were working was one of the newer communities that Free the Children was working in,” said Gibbs. “So, we were working on two schoolrooms and a washroom facility that would be inside the school.”

In the existing school, 350 students shared four rundown classrooms that would flood with each rain, she said. Building two new rooms would allow the older students to be separated from younger students, where they could be encouraged to pursue post-secondary education.

A decent washroom facility would help to encourage girls to stay in school longer, because many drop out as they get older, usually due to a lack of proper facilities, she said.

“When they drop out of school they’re married off and often get pregnant really young, as young as 15, and they get right back into the cycle of poverty,” said Gibbs.

Part of the cost of construction was covered by funds raised at Ecole Good Shepherd School last year. Gibbs had visited the school in the fall of 2014, after returning from her first Free the Children volunteer trip to Ecuador.

“With the Grade 5s they have a program with ME to WE so they asked me to go in and talk to the kids about the program and what I did in Ecuador,” said Gibbs. “It ended up turning into a huge movement with the kids.”

Students at the K – 6 school began holding fundraisers through the school year, and by the end of June their total came to $10,000. The school contacted Free the Children and requested the funds be put toward the school Gibbs would be working in.

“That was really cool, that the schoolroom in Antri that I helped build was from the $10,000 that the kids at Ecole Good Shepherd School fundraised,” said Gibbs.

Beyond their physical work at the school, Free the Children volunteers were provided with opportunities to engage with the community. Gibbs said meeting people in the village and seeing their day-to-day lives was eye-opening.

Gibbs and her fellow volunteers went into a family home for one day to follow a woman through her daily routine, including learning how she cooks for her family and how she retrieves water in clay pots from the open well about 10 kilometres away.

“She talked to us about how her two youngest daughters who were 15 and 16 were already married and already pregnant, and how she wishes that when they were growing up that girls staying in school was more common,” said Gibbs. “It made our work even more important.”

One of the more impactful visits they made was to a group of three women who ran a health centre specifically for women, she said. In smaller villages women are often told they’re not allowed to see doctors or seek help because the only person they should have to rely on is their husband, she said.

The clinic is set up to provide nutrition packets for pregnant women in need, or to provide refuge for victims of domestic violence or rape in their homes, she said. There is no other help or support system for these women because it’s taboo for a woman to stand up for herself or leave her home, she said.

“These three women are putting themselves in danger every day to help other women,” said Gibbs. “They’re in danger of persecution from the government and putting themselves into dangerous home situations to help women who need it the most.”

Gibbs said she was unexpectedly shocked by some of the things she witnessed in Antri, such as children wearing their government-issued school uniforms even on Sundays – their one day off school – as they sit on the side of the road.

“That hit me hard, because the kids that are fortunate enough to go to school are still living at such a low level within society,” she said. “Sure, they go to school and the government provides them with these uniforms, but back home often these kids are taking care of their younger siblings or their parents don’t have food to feed them so they’re sitting on the side of the road begging for food.”

Gibbs said she wasn’t prepared for the culture difference to be so drastic and heartbreaking.

The best part of her trip was seeing how happy the village people, especially children, were to have the help offered by Free the Children. She found people were genuinely excited to see the group every day.

“I compared that to back home, where we take so much for granted,” said Gibbs. “I think that was something, that genuine love and happiness in its purest form, and just learning to live in the moment and take everything in.”

Now that she’s home, Gibbs said she’s trying to live every day with that same genuine emotion, and she hopes to spark something in members of her own community.

“I really want to encourage everyone to find something they’re passionate about, no matter old they are or what it is,” said Gibbs. “Especially after this trip, I realized nothing is too small to make a difference and everything counts.”

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