[IB9] Fundraising for the victims of typhoon Haiyan in Philippines

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.