Emma Vanderlee's Story
“How can people with so little be so happy but people with so much be so unhappy?”
In my life I have asked so many questions, and most of them were easily answered by my parents, teachers and friends. However, this puzzling question came to me when I was lucky enough to be in Kenya with Craig Kielburger, Renee Hodgkinson, Russ McLeod and my family on a Leaders Today trip. I had the experience of my lifetime!
I’m 9-years-old, and on a normal day of school I am usually greeted nicely by my friends. But I’ve never been greeted like I was the day I went to visit students in a Kenyan community called Enelerai. Free The Children, Leaders Today’s partner organization, is currently building a new school for students in Enelerai, but right now they are still studying in an old one.
I climbed down from the green machine (a truck we travelled around in) and all I could see and feel were lots and lots of girls all dressed in blue and green school uniforms touching and screaming their happy greetings at me. You might think that I felt a little overwhelmed, but all I could think about and see were big smiles and how happy everyone was to see us. That definitely wasn’t what I expected.
Over the next three days I spent a lot of time with children in Enelerai. Each time I visited I couldn’t help but notice how happy they were, even though I now know they have so little.
For food, many of the children only receive the beans mixed with corn that Free The Children provides for their lunch at school each day. Without this one meal, many of the children wouldn’t get any food at all. For water, they walk a great distance to the river because they have nothing else to drink (Free The Children is building a water project so soon they won’t have to do this). To get to school, some of them walk for more than an hour each way and don’t have shoes to wear. The classrooms where they currently study, until the new Free The Children school is finished, are made of mud and dung, and about four kids usually share one desk.
Now think about how much children in Canada have. We have water fountains with clean water, computers in our classrooms, cell phones, sinks in every class, pizza every Wednesday and subs every Friday. Plus we get a big breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of the week and all the toys you can imagine. Even though children here have all of these things, many of them are still so unhappy compared to the children in Enelerai.
I would have thought it would be the other way around.
What do you think?
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