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Elaine's Blog 34 days ago
It's a long way from selling B.C. real estate to healing Rwanda. But 56-year-old Maple Ridge-native Cathy Emmerson made the move — the biggest of her life — six years ago and never looked back. The former real estate agent first visited the tiny, landlocked Eastern African country in 2001 on a five-day gorilla trekking trip — the country's prime tourist draw. But once there, she "saw there was far more to Rwanda than gorillas." What was there was a country and a people making strides in rebuilding their country after genocide ripped the nation apart in 1994 leading to the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 to a million people. the destruction of cities, land, families, and spirits. She saw a country with a new leader, Paul Kagame, dedicated to reconciliation between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples and committed to modernizing the country: improving telecommunications, re-building tourism and educating youth and young adults. She vowed to return to learn more ...Elaine's Blog 40 days ago
North Vancouver's Jeffrey Torres gets a clear reminder every time he opens his fridge of his good fortune in living in a country where his parents can afford to care for him. On a magnet on the door is a picture of 12-year-old Madleen Jameel Zeidat — an Israeli girl his parents sponsor through World Vision Canada. After graduating from Argyle Secondary School in 2007, Torres began thinking about how he would make his own mark in the world and contribute. He found his thoughts turned back to the charity his parents supported, and to the needs of children like his sponsor-sister. So the then-19-year-old set himself a goal: he would challenge his body by completing in the 2008 Penticton Ironman and challenge his community to help him raise money for World Vision. After months of gruelling training, he successfully finished the race — the youngest male to do so, with a time of 12 hours and 35 minutes. More importantly, he says, he managed to leverage his race to ...Elaine's Blog 48 days ago
Every five seconds, someone in the world goes blind. Every minute, one of those is a child. SEVA Canada Society, a Vancouver-based registered charity, is on a mission to turn back the clock and save their sight. It's a mission that has captivated Vancouver Island resident Dr. Marty Spencer for more than 20 years. The Nanaimo ophthalmologist has been working with SEVA (the name means "service" in Sanskrit), since 1987 when he travelled to Nepal with his wife and young daughters to volunteer his skills in eye care and surgery. There, he often found himself working with out-dated technology or none at all: when the electricity went out during operations, he had to learn to perform eye surgery by flashlight. But the rewards were greater than the challenges. "There is no feeling like it, seeing those smiles after you restore people's sight. When you go to those countries and see the poverty and how little people have, it just feels so good to help," says the ...Elaine's Blog 55 days ago
It was a Free the Children presentation last year that inspired Rockridge Secondary student Laura Cameron to refocus her thinking from me to we. A talk by children's charity co-founder Marc Keilburger, who came to speak at a district leadership conference in West Vancouver, got the the teen thinking seriously about the plight of her peers in developing countries. "I was really inspired and I thought that more people from our school should be able to hear him and be inspired by him like I was," recalls Cameron, a 15-year-old Grade 11 student. So together with classmate Kelly Trach, she organized for a Free the Children speaker to visit her own school and in the process she got the student body fired up to help. By the end of the year, with contributions from student council-led fundraisers, the school had raised more than $4,000 towards building a school in Ecuador in the rural region of Chimborazo province. The region is home to the nation's ...Elaine's Blog 62 days ago
As a child at church, Langley resident James Woller recalls vividly hearing a missionary talk about his work in Africa. The images of impoverished children he shared stayed with the youth, inspiring Woller to wear a pendant of Africa around his neck to remind him of the need to help the less fortunate. So after Woller graduated from Trinity Western University with an international affairs degree and set out to travel, one of the places he was determined to see was Africa. There, in an impoverished abandoned mining town in the tiny country of Swaziland, called Bulembu, he came full circle with the convictions of his childhood and dedicated himself to helping the community through his work with the Bulembu Foundation. Bulembu was a town in trouble in a country in crisis. Swaziland, a mountainous kingdom encircled by South Africa is home to about a million people — 65 per cent below the age of 21 — due in part to the massive impact of AIDS. At least 38 ...
