Dovydas Jokšas -
The human‘s nature is
to look only around himself and care only about his own environment. CAS tries
to make students be different by developing caring and open-mindedness in everyday
life. The activity that I am going to write about is closely related to the IB
mission of intercultural understanding – me Dovydas Jokšas and my classmates –
Vaiva Zokaitė and Karolina Vitkevičiūtė - were doing fundraising for the victims
of typhoon Haiyan in Philippines.
Two months ago Vaiva
Zokaitė, my classmate, offered me to organise a fundraising action in
Didzdvaris gymnasium to help victims in Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan hit the
islands of Philippines on the 8th of November with the speed of 300 km/h. Many
big cities in the country were destroyed, including the infrastructure –
transport, healthcare, education and many other systems. It was the deadliest
natural disaster in the history of Philippines, because at least 6000 people
were killed and few thousands are still missing. Over a million lost their
homes, many have lost their jobs and families. The damage of millions of US
dollars was made. We thought that it would be a great chance to help those
people. We searched for the information what would be the best way to help the
victims. The organisations that were working there (particularly – Red Cross
organisation) announced that financial
help would be the best, because sending products to the Philippines where the
transport system was mainly destroyed would be complicated – the aid had to be
centralised with the help of money. Therefore, we started to brainstorm what is
the best way to collect as much money as possible. We thought of charity boxes
which would be placed in the corridors of our school, but we abandoned this
idea because the previous practise in our school shows that it does not attract
much money. Finally, we decided to make presentations in every class, so that
students would get enough information about the tragedy and would decide
whether they want to contribute or not. The organisation that we decided to
donate to was the Red Cross of Philippines. Its’ goal was to ensure food, clean
water, shelter and medicine for 100 000 affected families.
In Didzdvaris
gymnasium there are over twenty classes, thus it was not easy to organise
presentation for every one of them. With the help of four our gymnasium‘s class
coordinators we arranged the time of presentations in every class meeting – all
coordinators accepted this idea very well. From the 18th of November the
presentations started. At first we were not sure if the students in classes
will be interested in these presentations and the idea itself. As we started
the presentations, we were pleasantly surprised how nicely students accepted it.
It was great to see how willingly many students were donating the money to help
the people who are over 9000 km away from Lithuania. After few days from the
start of our action, due to the huge load of work, our classmate Karolina
Vitkevičiūtė joined to help us. After four weeks of hard work we have made an
extra presentation for the teachers of our gymnasium and by that ended the
fundraising. The very last part of our project was to count the money and send
it to the Red Cross – we have counted 950 Lithuanian Litas which was a huge amount
of money taking into account that it was donated by the community of school.
Just after the Christmas we sent the money to the Lithuanian Red Cross from
where it was transferred to the Red Cross of Philippines.
Such events as this
are a great way to help other people. After this voluntary action the three of
us were really happy of the result we achieved. It was a great example for us
that with a lot of effort so much can be done – for the money that we donated a
few thousands of food rations or a few hundreds of medical kits can be bought.
We understood how easy it is sometimes to improve the life of others.
