Charity’s awards
A TEENAGER who set up a volunteer group to rebuild an earthquake-damaged school and a pupil who designed an app that could save the lives of road traffic accident victims are among those honoured by a Jewish education charity.
World ORT has named more than a dozen pupils from four countries as winners of its Gina and Joseph Harmatz Award, a social action accolade.
Alejandro Lew, an ORT student in Mexico City, was recognised after putting together a team of volunteers to help rebuild a school damaged by an earthquake.
After collecting sponsorships, donations and materials including paint, brushes and cement, Alejandro and his group set about repairing the damage. “At the end of the project, we had very good results,” he said.
“Kids painted little ceramic butterflies and pasted them on the wall of the plaza in the school and spent some more quality time together getting to know each other.”
Another ORT pupil to receive the award was Lucas Adlerstein, 17, who developed an app that could help save lives after witnessing the many road traffic accidents in Buenos Aires every day.
He used the specialist technology labs at his ORT Argentina school to come up with a system that scans a fingerprint to access the injured victim’s medical records and family details from Argentina’s national fingerprint database — a vital source of information for paramedics.
The teenager estimates his project could reach 70 per cent of Buenos Aires-based hospitals initially, with more than 10,000 people signed up to the system within months.
A system that scans the prints of car crash victims