Christmas Community Service

I have a friend named Christina. She is a very active young leader in Madagascar. Her dream is to make that country a better place for people. In the occasion of the Christmas 2016, she had an idea to make Malagasy orphans and underprivileged kids to experience Christmas differently. She discussed me about that project and I found it was a very interesting idea. So, we worked together to make it happens. We began by doing crowdfunding to buy toys for these children. We also collected toys from anyone who wanted to help us. We even visited friends and the friends of our friends’ house to collect them. I asked my friends from Lafayette Initiative for Malagasy Education program to give us hands for that project. All of us gave our best for that project. In the end, we received more than we expected.  

To make our gifts as special as possible, we wrapped them one by one. We had collected a lot of presents that we had to divide our task to fasten the wrapping. Some of us were responsible for selecting toys according to ages and others were responsible for wrapping the gifts. The other part of the team was responsible for decorating the gifts and others were responsible for distributing the gifts based on their destination. It was a tiring but at the same time a very enjoyable moment because we had good teamwork and organization. It took us an entire day to finish them all with 15 people who participated in that project. 

 

 

 

 

Our gifts were donated to 3 different places where the kids have not the chance to celebrate Christmas like others. Most of them were orphans or street kids who do not even have any family to take care of them. 

 

For me, this project was a success because we did what we wanted to do. Personally, I really loved the energy and the enthusiasm of all my friends who worked with me in that project. They gave all their energy for that project. And the good thing about it is that they were there for their own will.  The truth is Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Most of the people there gain less than 1 dollars a day. Working with those friends reminded me that there is still hope in our world and change will begin from the young generation. In a large scale, what we did may seem to be a drop of water in the middle of a sea. However, if there will be a lot of those drop of water, the result will become a flood. 

During that project, we had an opportunity to meet the Priest, Pierre Pedro. He contributed all his name in service of my country. He created a house, school, hospital, and job for underprivileged families in my country. For us in Madagascar, he did a lot more than any of our presidents. The priest Pedro believes that kids are the future of this young country. So all his works focus on how to make them good citizens in Madagascar. Everybody in Madagascar loves him for his work. This community service that we made gave us the opportunity to meet him in person.  He gave us a lot of good messages and exhort us to continue. He wished us to have the same dream as we grow up.

The followings pictures show photos of some of my friends who contributed to this project. Now that I am in the United States, I miss them but we still keep in touch. We try to remain an optimist for our homeland.