AN Dongqi (China)


Editor CAI Liang

Ann is one of my best friends at Lingnan University. She always looks for volunteer opportunities and so she has many volunteer experiences. Here, I am going to share one of her experiences of volunteering in the USA last summer.

There are mainly two reasons causing Ann to participate in the voluntary camp in America last year. The first one is that the voluntary agency is reliable. She has participated in a program organized by the Voltra agency in Hong Kong before and she finds that she can communicate with people who hold totally different life experiences from her. The culture shock gave her unforgettable memories. The second reason is that compared to the USA, African countries are much safer.

During the summer camp last year, Ann was responsible for teaching high-risk American students Chinese history. These students are somewhat special, they failed the history subject in school, therefore, they attend this summer camp to catch up. They have history classes in the morning and tutorials in the afternoon. For lunch, there will be different foods prepared by volunteers from different countries.

After the summer camp last year, Ann reflected that the reason these students are in this situation is often due to objective reasons, such as parents going through divorce or cancer. When we were talking about education equality, Ann mentioned that she thought American students were lucky, as even though they have failed their history courses, they still have opportunities to participate in this summer camp to catch up with others. Charities in the USA will raise money for them. However, for students from African countries, children will lose many chances to study because of economic lag and incomplete social welfare. Even for volunteers, some of them may be worried about their own security in Africa countries. Therefore, Ann holds the view that the education inequality is mainly due to the economic conditions and social welfares.

 

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