The Global Issues Club at RSS staged a T-shirt blitz to raise roughly $400 to support an orphanage in Cambodia.
The T-shirts, emblazoned on the front with the motto, “Build for their future” — a play on the RSS motto, build for the future — was designed collectively by the students, said David Sterpin, the club’s teacher.
“We were kind of secretive within our club,” explained Nemaiah Shaw, designing and ordering the shirts without letting the word leak out.
“We convinced all the teachers to buy a t-shirt, which raised a lot of money in the first place,” student Jake Fantin said about the next stage in the students’ undercover campaign.
“On the sly,” Sterpin said, T-shirts were sold to every single staff member in the building. “Custodians, teachers, secretaries, education assistants, they all supported the idea, everybody bought a shirt.”
Then, when the shirts arrived, the club members came to school early, put up posters, and quickly distributed the shirts to all the staff — “a big schemozz,” Sterpin said, “as they’re all different sizes, different colours, different arm lengths.”
In the coup-de-grace, everyone donned their shirts.
The rest of the student body arrived at school unaware of the plot that had been brewing. “A buzz was created,” Sterpin said.
The stir convinced more than 100 students to buy shirts as well, so altogether more than $400 was raised to support the Cambodian orphanage which Sterpin and his family — including his son Xander and daughter Hannah, also members of the club — encountered as they traveled through Asia in 2009 and 2010.
“Our tuk-tuk driver in Phnom Penh said to us, do you want to visit an orphanage? I thought that was an odd sort of thing to offer a tourist,” Sterpin recalled. “Eventually I realized that a) there was a need, and b) there’s some orphanage tourism there in some ways.”
In either case, the family agreed to go and ended up volunteering at the orphanage for more than a week, teaching English to the kids.
“There were 26 kids living full-time at the orphanage,” Sterpin said, “And they’re not all orphans, some of them are actually kids with one parent who just can’t afford [another kid.]”
Mr Samid, who runs the orphanage, originally trained as a monk, but then worked in the forest service before contracting malaria and finding his subsequent calling at the orphanage.
The days were hot and, “God love ‘em, the food was awful,” Sterpin said, but that is not the only difficulty faced by the children. “Cambodia is really, really poor. It’s corrupt, the government’s awful. There’s abject poverty next to obscene wealth, and very little in between.”
Sarita Dole, a club member who has also traveled to Cambodia, concurred. “There really was no middle class, just the really rich and the really poor.” Dole also attributed much of the country’s problems to government corruption.
Considering solutions, Xander Sterpin expressed optimism. “Organizations like [our club] for sure help out.”
Racheal De Rosa added, “If everyone helps out, we can get people out of poverty.”
Julie Huttemann felt it was not only possible to make a difference, but our responsibility.
“I think it’s important to do whatever we can. We’re really privileged here in Canada.”