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| Young girls in Nairobi, Kenya, laugh after watching an educational skit by some older students. Courtesy of Lauren Prince |
One girl's global helping hand
Lauren Prince was just a teenager when an ocean tsunami washed away many Asian villages in 2004. But she was determined to help.
from the December 24, 2007 edition
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Lauren and several others at her school got to travel to India during their spring break in 2005. Nine students and five adults, including Lauren's mom, visited some of the villages that their funds had helped rebuild.
The group rode in a few of the boats that their money had bought and met some of the children at Rising Star whose parents had been aided by microloans.
The 10-day trip – especially the visit to Rising Star – was life-altering, Lauren says. Everyone was nervous about seeing how much some people had suffered. But by the time they had returned to the US, they all viewed poverty and disability in a totally different way.
"It helped us to realize that we can't be too quick to judge [someone]," she says.
Lauren feels that her whole hometown has changed because of helping the tsunami survivors. "People are more willing to step forward now when some crisis happens," she says. "Right after [hurricane] Katrina had happened, our school opened [its] arms ... to some students who had been displaced."
Lauren, too, is different. Before the tsunami, she says, "I was very much a teenage girl – very interested in shopping and going to the mall and talking about gossip. And after I got back [from India], I was not interested at all in any of those things."
Now she's more focused on doing what she can to help others.
While in India, she learned about an organization called NetAid, which aims to educate and inspire young people to fight global poverty. Once she returned home, she got involved and that summer trained to become part of NetAid's Global Citizen Corps.
That's a national network of high school student leaders whose goal is get their peers on board in efforts to end poverty around the world.
Throughout her senior year, Lauren was active in the group. She even traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, with another corps member to see the living conditions at some of the orphanages there.
Lauren learned that the needs of different people in different places must be met in varying ways.
During spring break of her freshman year at Boston University, Lauren and her mom journeyed to Kenya and Uganda in East Africa. Their mission: to photograph the ways microloans had helped poor residents of the two countries.
Lauren's now a sophomore in college and is as active as ever in her community. One of her roles this year is to organize community-service events for the university's Panhellenic Council, an organization of the school's sororities and fraternities.
She doesn't know what kind of career she wants after college, but Lauren's sure it will involve public service. The tsunami fund drive and trip to India made her realize that helping people makes her happy, and she wants that to be a big part of her career. And she encourages other kids and adults to consider how they can serve society, too.
"Everybody has something to offer to somebody else, and everybody should help in whatever way that they can," she says. "Because whatever strengths you have might be a weakness for somebody else and vice versa. So if you can use your strength to help somebody else, you should."
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