While growing up in rural India, Mahendra`s childhood dream was to work in engineering. However, due to his parent’s low income, he was unable to receive a proper education to become an engineer. Once he became a father, he felt pressured to quickly find work in order to support his family. Like many youths in his village, Mahendra found himself working as a wage labourer due to a lack of job opportunities.
“I was not happy, as I never liked doing labouring work but I had no alternative,” recounts Mahendra.
As a result, the development of training programs as part of ChildFund India’s Prevention of Child Trafficking in South Rajasthan Training Project was life-changing for not only Mahendra, but for many children and youths in his village.
“I saw a ray of hope when I heard about the training program. Without a second thought, I said yes and joined the program.”
At its core, the project aims to protect children’s rights and prevent the trafficking of children in India, which sometimes occurs due to high levels of poverty and a lack of employment opportunities. As a subset, the initiative also involves providing vulnerable youths with new sets of skills that will allow them to have new job prospects within their communities.
Each year our friends at Kingston School in Indonesia organise a fundraiser to support other children around the world through ChildFund Australia. The whole school, from preschool to secondary, gets involved. In 2014, they turned their attention to the plight of street children in Myanmar and decided to raise money to support ChildFund Myanmar`s programs to stop child trafficking.
The giant fundraiser kicked off with some wonderful dancing from the kindy kids. One class chose to perform a traditional Batak dance from Lake Toba (pictured above). When this dance is performed it is customary for the audience to place money between the dancers’ fingers. The Kingston Kindergarteners were so good that their fingers were overflowing with rupiah! Others chose ballet, hip-hop dancing and one class even dressed up as flowers.
Principal and long-time ChildFund Australia sponsor Ms Yin helps organise the fundraiser every year. Of the Kindergarteners’ efforts, she says: “It certainly was a great start. Everyone was spurred on to raise even more money. I actually had to issue a warning that the next week was exam week so the students needed to study and postpone fundraising until after the exams!”
The Christmas Bazaar was the main event with all the students dressed in red and green. There was music, magic shows and drama performances, stalls offering delicious treats and handmade trinkets, and even an auction.
“The auction I had to keep an eye on. One student asked if she could auction off her violin!” says Ms Yin. “I am not sure her mum would have been very pleased about that.”
The students love the annual fundraiser, which they say is amazingly fun and rewarding. This year Kindergarten took out the top honour raising a huge 8.5 million rupiah (approximately AU$850), closely followed by Year Seven and Year Five.
“You might wonder why Kingston is so into fundraising,” says Abiyu, a student journalist reporting for the school magazine. “It is because we need to be helping other people who are in need, people who are suffering outside of our little Kingston world.”
Altogether the school raised almost $5,000 to support child protection programs in Myanmar. This brings their total fundraising to nearly $15,000 in support of children living in poverty since 2011!
