 Marc Kielburger is a Rhodes scholar, a young lawyer educated at Oxford and
Harvard.
But as the chief executive director of Free The Children told hundreds of
Grade 11 and 12 students in Waterloo Region, his most important teachers didn't
have a long list of degrees and awards.
Some didn't even have shoes.
They were young people -- street kids, poor villagers, slum dwellers -- who
have shown incredible courage and heart in the face of adversity.
That young people can change the world was the message Kielburger brought to
the YMCA's Global Youth Forum held at Bingemans.
His brother Craig was only 12 in 1995 when he started Free The Children. He
read an article about a child labourer and recruited some friends to do
something about child labour.
Marc Kielburger said one of his greatest heroes was a boy from war-torn
Sierra Leone.
The boy was a middle school student when rebels walked into his school and
killed all the teachers. They offered the students two choices: to kill their
parents and join the rebels, or to have their right hands cut off so they would
never pull triggers for the government.
The boy, a student leader, walked to the front of the room to tell the rebels
they should leave because he and his schoolmates wanted peace. They cut off his
hand, but the boy managed to get medical help and survived.
Despite being right-handed, the boy learned to produce beautiful wood
carvings using his left hand. He sent the proceeds from sales back to school.
But when Kielburger met him, he said the most difficult decision of his life
wasn't to challenge the rebels and sacrifice his hand.
The most difficult decision came a few years later, when he chanced upon the
man who had cut off his hand. The decision was this: to shake the man's hand
with his remaining one, for the sake of peace. He did just that.
Kielburger told other tales of poor young people taking small, brave steps to
change the world for the better. In Canada, young people have far greater
privileges. With privilege comes responsibility, he said.
"You have to do something because we've kind of won the lottery."
One child dies of poverty-related causes every two seconds, Kielburger said.
"It's wrong. It's so fundamentally wrong. . . . The reality is, we don't have to
live like this."
It's estimated the war in Iraq could cost up to $4 trillion. Kielburger said
it would cost only $15 billion to put every child in the world in school -- less
than the world spends on cosmetics every year. It would cost $12 billion to
provide every child alive with clean drinking water. By comparison, he said,
Europeans alone spend $11 billion a year on ice cream.
"It's not that we can't do it, it's that we've chosen not to do it. We don't
have a money problem. We have a values and priorities problem."
Omar Moussa, 18, an Eastwood student, said Kielburger's talk inspired him to
start doing volunteer work locally. A lot of young people are only focused on
themselves, he said.
Bawi Cin, 18, a Waterloo Collegiate student originally from Myanmar, said he
could identify with Kielburger's tales. He remembers soldiers coming to his
village when he was a child and killing his family's animals. The talk
strengthened his resolve to go to college or university here, then return to his
home country, despite its repressive regime, to "try to fix something."
TheRecord.com -
Local - Stories of young heroes spur students to action
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