Youth camp expands student views
On a recent Monday morning, 18 students from a variety of high schools in Santa Fe gathered at Santa Fe Community College for the Global Youth Santa Fe camp. We put on our name tags, and chatter quickly filled the room.
Some of us knew each other from extracurriculars, but it was amazing to see how fast new friendships formed during the weeklong camp. That first day, we did leadership and team-building activities on the SFCC ropes course. When someone is holding a rope that will keep you plummeting from 30 feet in the air, you learn to trust them pretty quickly.
Under the direction of David Markwardt, the leader of the community college’s Teamwork in Action program, Global Youth Santa Fe was an opportunity for teenagers to educate and involve themselves in world issues and cultures.
During the week, June 12 through 16, we had speakers come and tell us about their countries of origin. Men and women who had moved to Santa Fe from Niger, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mexico and other nations came to share their stories with us. They shared their food, their native dress, their religious symbols and tokens, and their languages and traditions.
Some had left their homeland for less than joyous reasons, and explaining these things was often difficult emotionally. These were the stories that were the most heartbreaking and inspiring to hear.
One man is attending Santa Fe Community College to learn how to grow food through aquaponic systems and take his knowledge back to Niger to help people learn to farm in the harsh climate just south of the Sahara Desert. One woman left Mexico because of violence and to pursue her nursing degree. She told us that if she could accomplish this, we could do anything we put our minds to.
With the current political turmoil across the world, we can forget that we are all human. We can forget refugees are students like us. They had their lives — their friends and families, favorite food, pets, social media, goals for the future, movies and music, all of it. But something disrupted their lives so much that they found themselves not in their house with its familiar smells and sounds, but somewhere unfamiliar, such as on an orange raft, sitting next to a strange young woman holding a wailing baby.
One day we spoke via Skype with Ayman, a Syrian refugee who is currently on the border between Syria and Turkey. Ayman is working for the Red Crescent, the Middle East’s version of the Red Cross, helping other refugees escape her nation’s civil war.
Our class talked to him about his firsthand experiences of escaping the conflict in Syria. Ayman explained how he wants to move back to his home and help rebuild his community. Speaking to Ayman was very enlightening and made the refugee crisis more personal. After speaking to Ayman, we were given the opportunity to write a letter to displaced Syrians still in the war.
Talking to Ayman and the other speakers helped our class expand our views and helped us understand other people’s ways of life and cultures.
Ayman was so optimistic about the future, and he seemed so excited to be talking to a group of teenagers when he could have been sleeping, that it gave us all a reality check. These conversations have made us more compassionate and understanding to people in tough situations, as well as curious about other cultures and countries.
These are interactions that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives because, as we are so often told, we are the future, and this class has helped prepare us to create a future of peace.
Rachel Pearson, 15, attends the New Mexico School for the Arts and is interested in creative writing and theater. Jack Veenstra, 14, attends Santa Fe Prep and has varied interests but is considering a career in the medical field.