Past Projects Archive

On OG’s inaugural trip, our participants stayed in Sandema, a village in the impoverished Upper East Region of Ghana. We volunteered with Horizons Children’s Center (HCC) clearing land and making bricks for a proposed new house for the boy’s orphanage. HCC is primarily an orphanage for boys who used to be street children. Our work was laborious but fulfilling as we worked alongside Joe Abobtey, the project manager, and local construction workers to hack down bushes in the field and mix cement in the sweltering sun. When we were not out in the field, we were at the center working with the boys after school, helping them with homework and playing games (it was sad getting our butts kicked in soccer by 9 years olds though.) In Sandema, we also met Gilbert, the head of the Disabilities Center. He told us about his personal struggle as a person with disabilities and his work to empower and educate other people with disabilities in Sandema by helping them access healthcare and sensitizing the community to the issues of living with disabilities. After a month in Sandema, we traveled to Larabanga, a village just outside the popular tourist site Mole National Park. Even though Larabanga lost some of their own land for the creation of the park, the people of the village live in relative squalor compared to the prosperity found in Mole. We worked with village elders to document the challenges they faced especially in regards to water scarcity and water quality. We come home and produced a video documentary to help fundraise for the repair of 2 deep-water wells, which had been built years earlier by the World Bank and the EU. Unfortunately, the funds had only been allocated for construction and not upkeep so the wells had fallen into disrepair due to a lack of training and maintenance. Today, both of these wells are working properly, providing clean drinking water for a community of 5,000 people who previously acquired all water from the pond pictured below.

Upon our return to Sandema in 2008, we were excited to find that foundations had been laid for the new orphanage. We worked in small groups to help build the walls of the structure. When we weren’t building, the team was hanging out with the HCC boys at the center. Some of the group worked on compiling biographies and portraits of everyone involved in the center to be used in the updated website. Stories ranged from abuse to neglect and all underscored the importance of HCC’s work. OG participants also worked on literacy and English skills with the youngest boys. A number of the female participants in our group worked with a group of local girls to start a girl’s leadership group to talk about female empowerment, sex education and some of the pressures facing girls in Ghana and all over the world. This program is still active today. One of the volunteers, a pre-med student, took it upon herself to offer her services at the local  hospital. She was so moved by how hard the staff worked with a lack of essential resources that she started a campaign upon her return to fundraise for a portable ultrasound machine. Two years later, that dream became a reality and the maternal mortality rate at the hospital has dramatically decreased due to this one crucial tool.
 

This year, the group worked with Horizons Children’s Center on afterschool education doing science projects and helping with homework. Some of the more tech savvy volunteers focused their efforts on HCC’s computer resource center, an income generation project, which has proven to be a huge benefit to the community. Here we helped establish an internet connection, taught classes for basic and intermediate computer skills and fixed some of the salvageable computers. Many of the participants volunteered at the hospital working the understaffed laboratory helping to run critical Malaria and HIV tests. The girls in the group continued the Girl’s Leadership group, expanding it so that more girls in the community could join in. We also worked with Gilbert and the Disabilities Center to create a compilation of the goals and accomplishments of the center to be used in future fundraising efforts. Since Sandema was the first community OG worked in, we have created a special relationship with this place. We continued to work with our growing number of partners in the area to try and improve their quality of life and support the tremendous projects they have been working on for years.

We helped build a school out of mud and tires in a Bedouin village, Khan al-Akhmar, in the West Bank. The majority of the village’s demands, proper education included, were largely unheeded by both the Israeli and Palestinian governing bodies. The project came together with the help of Vento di Terra (an Italian NGO made up of environmentally responsible architects), Rabbis for Human Rights, Operation Groundswell and several other international organizations. The decision to build this school came from the needs of the Bedouin tribes in the region who previously had little access to any formal education. The children of the surrounding villages would need to walk several kilometers on the side of a highway to get to school, and a few of the children died in various traffic accidents. As a sad result, the Bedouins stopped sending their children to school. To remedy this situation, the community decided to build their own school but even this was somewhat controversial. Since Khan al-Akhmar is technically a refugee camp (since 1948), the local Bedouins are not allowed to build any structures with a foundation which essentially means the community is a bunch of relatively unstable shacks with corrugated tin roofs. The school was the village’s first structure with a foundation. OG participants, along with lots of excited local labourers, worked hard under the blistering sun for a weeks and completed the project with much fanfare. However, Citing potential safety issues and arguing that the structure should not have been built in the first place, the Israeli Defence Forces issued a demolition order on the building. Rabbis for Human Rights took the case to court, garnering international media attention and putting the village in the spotlight. The Israeli courts decreed a stop-order on the demolition and that the school could remain intact while in use. To this day, the school still stands and hundreds of Bedouin children have received an education because of OG’s work.

Continuing our connection with the same community, Khan al-Akhmar, our participants utilized the school space to run a two-week summer camp. We arranged soccer games, teamwork competitions, arts and crafts activities and general silliness that all children should be able to freely enjoy. Khan al-Akhmar is a refugee camp just outside of Jerusalem, off of Highway 1. The summer camp was set up in collaboration with Rabbis for Human Rights, Sisters of Domeni convent, the Mukhtar of the village and Operation Groundswell. The camp served two different purposes. First: to keep children busy and active during their summer break while learning and playing together. It was important for the children to have organized play, which would help foster their teamwork, cooperation and ability to work as a group. Second: to keep the school in use – the IDF has a demolition order on the school and the Israeli courts will not allow them to demolish the school while it is in use. At the start of the program, we had 15-20 children coming to the camp (voluntarily). By the last day, we had nearly 50 campers! The camp cost very little to run; only equipment and materials along with our transportation costs, coming partially from OG and partially from RHR. OG helped train some of the older kids to keep the camp open once we left. Also, we were able to get Right to Play and Unicef to take over the summer camp for the weeks after we had left.

Participants began their six-day stint with Safe Passage, a project working with children around the garbage dump of Guatemala City. We worked with the kids, doing a T-shirt painting project as well as other games and helping with English classes. We also got to visit the project extensively and speak with its director. On the Saturday, the last day of the programme, we went to a theme park with the kids. The week at Safe Passage was interesting. It demonstrated the operations and possible extent of a successful charity operation. It gave our participants a window on life in a developing world slum, in which the majority of the global population is likely to live within the next half-century according to many researchers. One OG participant created a new logo for FEDEPMA, and templates for using the Logo in many different spaces, and also designed new road signs for advertising FEDEPMA in San Pedro. The participant also committed to further work on contract with FEDEPMA from Canada, designing labels and other promotion materials. We found volunteer work for the rest of the group in San Juan through Rupalaj. They worked in their plant nursery and also giving English classes to the guides.

Our first project was in Auroville, India at the Sadhana forest project. Here we stayed in huts with other volunteers. This town was extremely unique as it was all about communal living. Here we stayed for 3 days and learnt about the reforestation project, and the different outreach programs conducted by the volunteers. We also fulfilled duties such as cooking, cleaning, first-aid, etc. Further, we volunteered in the forest planting trees for a day. Originally we were scheduled to volunteer here for two weeks, however after a long discussion with our participants and the long-term volunteers at Sadhana forest, we realized that this placement did not fit the purpose of our trip. Auroville was a place that did not identify with anyone nation or faith, not even India, and thus it made it difficult for participants to truly get immersed into Indian culture and get the experience that they signed up for. Since we didn’t find what we were looking for in Auroville, we decided to move back to Pondicherry since we would have more access to placements. Even though this was a last minute decision, we were able to organize a house to rent for the remaining 1 week and a half in South India. From our house, we lived communally while participants divided up with into different placements which included a few local public high schools, a local medical clinic and working with the local government on micro financing opportunities. In Ajmer we stayed at the Mayani Hospital and were partnering with the Sudhar Subha. We first sponsored a cataract surgery camp and through our sponsorship, 20 people were able to get new cataracts. At this camp we worked in different areas of the hospital; some participants worked in the wards and helped serve food, some assisted patients from the surgery to the wards, and some observed the surgery. This was a four day process and in this time we had also visited the school for the blind that was in association with Sudhar Subha and learnt about their activities and programs. After the eye-camp was over, we took a break to go to Jaisalmer for the weekend (mentioned below). We then resumed to go back to Ajmer and worked at the orphanage for 3 days. Here we had two initiatives: the participants working at the girl’s orphanage were involved with making a scrapbook for the girls and the participants at the boy’s orphanage were involved with running sport workshops.

We traveled to 4 countries and volunteered in many cities and towns on this trip. In Kisumu, we volunteered with a local youth group called Blue Cross, who work to improve the lives of marginalized youth in Nyalenda Slum. Together we organized an event to be hosted by Blue Cross for people in the community to come together to discuss the upcoming constitutional referendum. This was the topic of heated political debate across the country, and yet no constructive debates were held in the slums where instead youth are often used as pawns by politicians who pay a pittance for young people to disturb opposing political events. This event was a great success both as a forum for peaceful discussion and as a platform for Blue Cross to be recognized for the positive work it does with youth in the community. We then headed North to Maragoli where the team worked on a number of projects. We helped to refurbish the resource center and ensure that it did not lose its computers as collateral for a loan taken out in order to pay for a full time librarian. To accomplish this, the team used fundraised funds to pay the registration fees for all of the students in the area. Everyone in the team spent one or two days with a host. One of our team members was taken to a trickling stream. After learning about a method to turn that tiny stream into a source of fresh water for the community he set out to work. In 10 days he organized a workforce and began measuring and digging. No one from this trip will ever forget the joy we all shared on the afternoon when the whole community came down to the stream to celebrate filling their buckets for the first time. We played and splashed and rejoiced. Another small group focused their efforts on a proposed polytechnic school. The school needed to have 2 long drop toilets in order to be eligible for national funding. The bathrooms were built and less than a year later the polytechnic is up and running. In central Uganda we spent 2 days planting seedlings with Sustainable Livelihoods international. We also assisted in the establishment of two school tree nurseries at Nankandula and Kyamulalama Primary Schools located in Kiyuni and Butikiro villages respectively. More than 1000 tree seeds were potted.