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One person doing extraordinary things
(by Karen F. Mrnarevic - August 13, 2008)
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Photo courtesy of Scott Karrel
Scott Karrel posed with a group of children during his trip to , Africa, in the summer of 2007. He went to with a group called “All-Out Africa,” where he volunteered at a Neighborhood Care Point for orphaned children.
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As an individual human, it can be daunting to consider one’s place in the world, the limited scope of one’s potential to effect change in the lives of others. Like a drop of water in a vast ocean or a single grain of sand on an endless shoreline, it is hard to imagine that one person can really have much of an impact in this great big world. There are obvious exceptions, leaders of entire movements, men and women with powerful voices and huge followings. But the likes of Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela – no ordinary person could be expected to live up to that kind of standard. Not so, says Scott Karrel.
“My main thing is that one person – an ordinary person – can do extraordinary things,” says the 20-year-old River Vale native. For just as a torrent would not be possible without the least of its comprising droplets, a movement, a revolution, would not be possible without its individual members. “When [people are] all put together – like what CARE does, it brings a lot of people together – they can do even greater things.”
Karrel, a Boston University junior majoring in International Relations with a focus in Africa, has spent the past two months as an intern with CARE, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. But his desire to work toward ending global poverty did not begin with his internship at CARE.
Three years ago, in the summer between his junior and senior years at Pascack Valley High School, Karrel told his parents that he really wanted to go to . Being “really understanding,” as he calls them, his parents were happy to oblige, and Karrel booked a ticket with “Global Routes,” a volunteer organization for teenagers.
Over the course of his five weeks in , Karrel helped to build a school. The work was rewarding, but more than anything, it was the Ghanaian people with whom he lived and worked that got him to think more about the larger problems faced by Africans in general, as well as the general apathy of the citizens of our much more affluent nation.
“In I lived with a local family – which is a huge culture shock – in a rural, rural village,” he says. When he returned home, he found that his peers seemed largely ignorant of what life is like for the majority of Africans, unaware of the poverty so widespread that it pervades every aspect of rural African life.
“All my friends were asking me things like, ‘Did you ride an elephant?’” Dismayed by the misinformed comments of his classmates, Karrel made it his mission to educate them about the realities of hunger, lack of education and disease so common in Africa that they are norm rather than the exception. He created a documentary about world poverty and humanitarian efforts to stop it, and worked with his school’s social studies teachers to make it a day-long event, entitled, ‘A Day to Make Poverty History.’
Last summer, Karrel returned to Africa to volunteer with the “Orphan Care Project” in , run by an organization called “All-Out Africa.” Volunteers with the Orphan Care Project perform the indispensable task of providing basic education and one-on-one care for the children, while improving the infrastructure of their community by building dwellings, planting gardens and installing water systems.
The people of have suffered mightily from the effects of AIDS, unemployment and severe drought. As a result, 60 percent of children in the country cannot afford to go to school. But what’s worse, in 2005 about 40 percent of ’s population was HIV positive; by 2010, there will be close to 200,000 orphaned children in the Kingdom (source: www.all-out.org).
Faced with such overwhelming statistics, it’s easy to turn away and say, “How could I possibly make a difference in the lives of these people?” Karrel, and hundreds like him, believes that humanitarianism must work from the ground up – by teaching the children of an impoverished nation the necessary skills to raise their communities out of poverty, a chain of events is set in motion.
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Staff Photo by Karen F. Mrnarevic
20-year-old River Vale native Scott Karrel stands before a CARE poster at his Aug. 7 presentation at the Ridgewood Library, entitled, “Local Heroes: People Making a Difference in the World.” The presentation was part of his internship with CARE’s Policy and Advocacy Unit and was meant to highlight the humanitarian efforts of North Jersey residents.
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However, he points out, another vital component of humanitarianism is advocacy – working on both a local, national and international level to prompt politicians to make policy decisions that will benefit these struggling peoples. This was one of the more important lessons Karrel learned through his internship with CARE’s Policy and Advocacy Unit.
As part of his internship, along with the cooperation and support of his boss, Sarah Lynch, Field Coordinator of CARE USA’s Policy and Advocacy Unit in the Northeast division, Karrel organized and executed a presentation entitled “Local Heroes: People Making a Difference in the World” on Aug. 7, at the Ridgewood Library.
His mission in the project was to identify people who live within the North Jersey region who have contributed significantly (not necessarily monetarily) to global humanitarian causes. He then invited them to make a presentation of their experiences to a group of interested community members.
It wasn’t particularly difficult for Karrel to locate people in Northern New Jersey who exemplify the small-scale humanitarian whose work snowballs to effect global change. In fact, all it took was a Google search to find what he was looking for. “If you just go out on the Internet and look, there are dozens upon dozens of people who have done incredible things, either traveled or started their own nonprofit,” he said. “The weird thing is that they are the mother down the street or the fraternity brother… You would never think that.”
The “Local Heroes” participating in Karrel’s presentation come from many different backgrounds, but they all share a common goal – improving the quality of life for the world’s neediest people, whether they are impoverished or war-ravaged, disease-addled or in the midst of environmental crisis.
On one end of the spectrum is Beth Fernandez, a Glen Rock realtor and mother of two who founded the “Glen Rock Poverty Awareness Project,” which most recently raised funds to bring clean water to sub-Saharan Africa. On the other end is Ekema Akaezuwa, Ph.D., a native of , who founded the “Global Literacy Project,” which brings books to, and facilitates literacy education in, the poorest regions of the world. Akaezuwa himself is an example of the power of literacy to change a person’s circumstance; he came to this country with no formal schooling, taught himself to read, and ended up earning a doctorate.
Also among this diverse group is Philip Thiuri, a professor at William Paterson University whose organization, “Rural Reading Centers,” promotes literacy in . Judy Baker, a Mount Tabor resident, sits on the Board of Directors of “From Houses to Homes,” which builds homes for the impoverished people of . Her 12-year-old son Sam, whom she adopted from , has completed two service projects in the past two years, raising $6,000 and donating soccer balls to Guatemalan children.
Mark Hyman, a teacher at Tenafly Middle School, is the founder of Global Care Unlimited; his organization has raised $60,000 toward landmine removal in and rehabilitation of Cambodian landmine victims, and $65,000 to sponsor construction of a school in . Montville native Michael Wenger, a senior at Colgate University, has worked with Thiuri in the past and recently earned a grant to go to to work with ProjectEducate. Sean Camoni works for CARE as an advocate in New Jersey’s ninth Congressional District. Were it not for time constraints imposed by the library, it seems this list could have gone on forever.
These, Karrel professed, are the real faces of global change; not faces of world renown or Hollywood celebrity, but faces of the housewife next door, the student down the block.
“The heroes of this country are the ordinary citizens who have answered the call of service to help others,” he said. “By volunteering to change one person’s life, you are helping out that community, that neighborhood, and ultimately that society.”
Karen F. Mrnarevic's e-mail address is Mrnarevic@northjersey.com.
For more information about CARE, visit www.care.org
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