Parent view, from Germany: 

Dear Liz and  all from the India Team,

This last week we have been snuggled in in Hamburg, drinking tea, eating cookies and watching the snowflakes outside while being much entertained by the discussions that Laurens’ adventures with all of you have provoked in our whole family. With Henry having been in Kenya with Round Square 2 years ago, and our daughter to China several years before, we have heard them discuss many of the developing world’s challenges with depth of insight and uncommon sympathy born of hands on experience. This additional perspective will serve them all well in the future.

Laurens has returned to us much enriched thanks to your thoughtful planning and careful execution. It is especially apparent that there was much attention paid to giving these teens ample opportunity to discuss and learn about the particular social and political parameters of the project and country they were visiting. Significantly, one of his first sentences upon returning home  was; “ Mama, In India, most people are happy most of the time; they don’t complain as much as people here do”. I can hardly imagine Laurens having had a better introduction to India…We thank you immensely for providing him with this opportunity, and wish all of those involved a successful new year 2010.

Margaret Nelson Spethmann

Student Voice from Canada

Often, people embark on service projects with an attitude that they will "make a huge difference". I don't think this is the case. This RSIS Project is about a group of diverse people from many different cultures coming together and connecting through a common goal: building the guidance centre for this Masai Girls Secondary School. It could have been built more efficiently if a group of hired workers did it, but if that were the case, I wouldn't be boarding a plane in 9 days with dozens of new friendships formed. If that were the case, people would never otherwise have met each other. Not only met, but formed strong friendship bonds that may last forever.

In the world we live in today, connecting people to people is so important. I know I live in a bubble back home and this project has opened my eyes to "the new" - new people, new cultures, new food, new landscapes and a new way of life.

We're all young people here and we need to have experiences like this. We need to see what is different to what we know and what we are comfortable with, because we need to be open-minded. We need to see new perspectives and this is what this RSIS Kenya Project has given us all.

Staying at Ilbissl, working on this project has pushed me out of my comfort zone. At the beginning we wrote our hopes and fears about the project. I hope that I would go out of my comfort zone and embrace it, and I did. I'd hardly gone to church in my life, and I'm not religious, but I went to the AIC church with an oepn mind and it was wonderful. I adored the singing and the passion. Although I love meeting new people, I was nervous about going somewhere where I only knew 3 people. Yet I have made so many friends and I've found there's hardly even time to write in my journal because I'm surrounded by so many amazing people who I want to talk to.

I've experience so much beauty in this project. Thank you for giving us all this opportunity to experience new things and connect with each other!

Student Voice from Kenya

A Kenyan student recalls how, on an international project, all the participating students spent days “engaged in …ferrying stones from one point to another.  I realized then that one person’s failure to fully participate in this kind of take-and-pass-on work would make it impossible for the whole project to succeed…In much the same way in the world, for anything to succeed completely, it will need support from all of the world.  Laxity of some people might cause the failure of the whole scheme.”

Student Voice from America

I went on a service project in India, and I learned my most valuable lesson from Diskit, a 17-year-old Ladakhi resident who taught me Ladakhi singing and dancing [while I taught her the American equivalents].  By the time we were beginning the Cotton-eye Joe and the Macarena, I realized that, after two hours and despite not knowing each other’s languages and hardly being able to relate to each other’s worlds, we were nothing more than two 17-year-old girls who loved learning to dance.  What I learned from her and Ladakh was not how different, but how alike we are.

Student Voice from South Africa

I went to do community service work with a group of people from many countries other than this one.  That experience in one of the several thousand rural villages of South Africa was one of my first exposures to what life is really like for the majority of South Africans, and for most of the world’s population.

Aside from finding the work rewarding and enjoyable, I began to realize the responsibility the world’s “privileged” have with regards to the “underprivileged.”  It is so easy to make a difference! — this experience taught me that.  Since that time I’ve decided to study medicine and look forward to doing as much as I can for those in South Africa for whom medical attention is not now an option…I’m particularly interested in doing whatever it takes to change the AIDS situation that is ravaging my country.

Student Voice from Australia

In my opinion, when you make a difference in the world, you will see a difference, for the better, in yourself.

Student Voice from France

Coming home, I didn't know what to expect but these three weeks have been an incredible experience. The fact that I met different people, from different countries, working together and playing with the amazing local children has really made this trip unique.