Each delegate will be limited to one piece of luggage, in addition to one carry on.
| Beginning | Preparation | Interim | Journey | Return |
Congratulations to all winners and thanks for submitting these winning speeches for publication. On behalf of the winners, We Thank the Educational Foundation for your continued support in awarding these deserving young people with these Scholarships. |
| Week 1 |
First Place-$1,000 Scholarship (USD): Megan Mulder From Vancouver, British Columbia |
Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the 21st century, and when a disaster appears on prime time television, we’re quick to respond. But then the television coverage fades away. Months pass. And we forget all about distant disasters. Let us return to Haiti. |
| Second Place-$500 Scholarship (USD): Jonathan Harris II From Upper Marlboro, Maryland |
| Good afternoon ladies and gentle men. My community response for the short and long term is a world response. Imagine this waking up in the morning next to your, father, mother and sister. Getting out of your bed, which was made of whatever materials you could find that night before. Your breakfast is whatever you find lingering around and your juice is that murky puddle 10 feet from where you just used the restroom. This is not fiction. It is not fiction that kids younger than us are recruited to be spies and soldiers. It is not fiction that 1 of every 4 dies in a nation. Indulge me ladies and gentlemen this is not a plot out of the next Hollywood film. This is the real, very real life of a person in Haiti. We have gotten away from what matters in this world. What country you are from does not matter, what region you live in does not matter. What matters is humanity. Money should not be a problem when it comes to saving lives. The United Nations, and other world organizations have done a excellent job providing relief measures for Haiti. But they only operate off of donations and small budgets. The overall relief measures are small. Countries are more concerned about their military prowess than saving a life. Have we come to a point where bombs and guns are worth more than a human life? There is an African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child!” Well ladies and gentlemen it takes a world to save a country. To save the children in Haiti we need a world response. To save the children in Haiti we need a world effort. Not just a few countries looking to push their own agenda. We need the world to see the job through, not just when it is popular on the news. We need to stop acting reactive and start acting proactive. To develop a community response we need to show the world the facts. Show the world how millions of people are displaced, how at night there is a risk of rape. After the campaign we need to hold the big countries, the world powers accountable. Make sure that they help even though it will not benefit them. Accountability is the key. We need to stop thinking of ourselves has Americans, Norwegians, Canadians, and say I am the brother or sister of 1.6 billion people on this plant we call earth. It does not take a rocket scientist to develop a response to help Haiti. It is simple. Make a statement to the world that we will hold every nation accountable for helping Haiti, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a world to help a Nation, Haiti. |
| Week 2 |
| First Place-$1,000 Scholarship (USD): Michaela Ann Shifley From Laurel, Montana Sponsored By: Billings Star Lodge Number 41 |
| So, to start off my speech today, I’m first going to give you a vocabulary word. Ready? The word is “infrastructure”. For those of you who don’t know what that means, infrastructure is basically the internal structure of a country, or how it’s set up. To help you get a better idea, picture… a boat. A big boat, like a yaht or a cruise ship. This boat represents the entire country of Haiti: the government, the people, the economy – everything. This is the infrastructure. Now, a normal boat would sail smoothly across the water. Maybe there are a few problems, but overall, the boat works just fine. This functioning boat would be a country like the U.S., China, or even England. They are all well functioning countries. But Haiti’s boat, Haiti’s boat has a leak. In fact, it has a ton of leaks, which means that there are holes in Haiti’s boat. One of these holes is the corrupt government. Another, even bigger hole, is the earthquake that just devastated thousands of peoples lives. There are other holes too. Here’s the hole where there’s no adequate healthcare treatment. This is where 60% of the Haitian population lack access to the most basic of healthcare services, like doctors or medication. Here’s the hole where 1 in 14 Haitian children die from a treatable disease before the age of five. This hole in the boat was caused by the 2,000 Haitian children that are sold to the Dominican Republic each year, often by their own parents! Here’s the hole for lack of education and schools, for child soldiers, for HIV/AIDS, and for violence. Each and every one of these holes is causing a leak, and so, in turn, the holes are causing Haiti’s boat to sink. It’s been sinking for a while, but it’s take a huge disaster – the earthquake- to finally bring everyone’s attention to the problem. Current relief efforts for Haiti are like patches on the holes- helping now, but will they still be there 20 years from now? People are hoping that if they put a little duct tape here, and here, that that will fix the problem. No. Open your eyes and realize that the problem lies with the boat itself, because there are too many holes to keep it afloat for much longer, no matter how much it’s patched. This leads me to my next section: developing and implementing a community response to help the children of Haiti, both in the near future and in the long run. We need to rebuild Haiti’s inner infrastructure, which translates to: we need a new boat. We need to rebuild from the bottom up. To do that, we first need a strong base, something that we can build up on. Starting in my own community of Laurel, MT I would work to raise awareness about just how dire the situation in Haiti is, because honestly, I don’t think that people in my town really understand. Posters, videos posted on YouTube, billboards – all would play a role in getting the community involved through donations and maybe even adoptions. I would petition the local community service organizations to set up donation boxes in stores and to raise money on their own. Next, I would go beyond Laurel, to different cities and towns across Montana, until I got the whole state involved in helping Haiti in some form or another. From there, I would strive to go national. Montana has one of the lowest populations in the U.S. We can’t do everything by ourselves. Community means a group of people working together towards a common goal. In this case, all of the states need to form a community and work together in order to bring Haiti back up to a self functioning nation. Ok, so now we have the bottom of the boat. This is, again, the foundation, the starting point, the short term immediate relief. Now for long term plans. When you think of a boat, you automatically assume that there are railings on the side to keep people from falling overboard. A safety net. We need to rebuild Haiti’s safety net by issuing more military support, training more doctors in Haiti, and providing all people with access to medical care. Now what else is the boat missing. Sails! Haiti is spinning and turning because there’s no government to give them direction. We can help Haiti by simply supporting reform in the Haitian government and helping to stand guard against corruption. The sails also represent Haiti’s failing education system. By donating books, used clothing, school supplies, and materials to rebuild schools, children will be able to get a proper education, which will, in turn, help them to succeed in the future. Sails are the most important part, because without them, the boat would go no where. Now, come back to reality. This boat isn’t real. But the thing is…it could be real. It only takes one caring person in one small community, like Laurel , Mt,…to start a revolution throughout the country. Making posters, posting videos, and simply advocating for the children of Haiti is only the beginning. By building a national community that truly cares, we can provide Haiti with a new, top of the line yaht, one that functions well in all areas; in the government, the economy, and self suffiency. Please help me to help Haiti. Thank you. |
| Second Place-$500 Scholarship (USD): Nicolas David Methot From Calgary, Alberta Sponsored By: Alberta Zone 3 |
| The UN Declaration of Human Rights states in the first article that all people are equal. With this in mind, when one views crises around the world, such as that in Haiti, the need for a response to the damage caused by the earthquake to an already struggling state is obvious. However, despite the flow of cash into Haiti, so much so that money sent home from Haitian nationals abroad in support of their families makes up a noticeable part of the Haitian GDP, only slow progress is being made. Over two thousand children are abducted and trafficked each year, and after the earthquake, school is almost unheard of – less than two percent of children finish secondary school. In addition, HIV and more easily prevented but just as damaging diseases like diarrhoea, cholera and tuberculosis claim the lives of one in fourteen infants and continue to affect the survivors for the rest of their lives. There are many reasons for this, some being government corruption, violence and trafficking and lack of resistant shelter, but what can be seen as one of the core causes of the slow progress is simple to diagnose, but startlingly complex to cure: fear. To explain this further, look once more at the UN Declaration – ‘all people are equal.’ This also means that they have the right to feel equal in the world. Nobody wants to live relying totally on the assistance of others, and when compounded by the fact that one’s ability to provide for one’s family has been impaired and the children are at risk of violence or trafficking, the power and presence of fear is very clear. Foreign aid is important in the short term – in fact, it is essential to providing a basic environment in which children and families can survive, especially with regard to storing and prepositioning food and essential supplies in a disaster prone region like Haiti. In the long-term, however, Haiti does not just need an economic and structural groundwork for future natural disasters, but a social and community groundwork to stave off earthquakes of all types. With regard to the aforementioned needs, I propose that we first look at the basics of a community – support, education, income and self-esteem. Let’s not try to just rebuild old communities, but help Haitians move on. An increased focus on psychological aid in the short-term, as well as an immediate infrastructure focus on moving people out of high risk camps will help achieve the goal of community support. In the long-term, however, support to Haiti should focus on rebuilding the people’s self-esteem, income and education. This can be done through an increased focus on microloan banks which give small, low interest loans to people with next to nothing and have been proven to dramatically affect the quality of life and willpower of the people when instituted in countries such as Bangladesh and India. Public education programs to increase awareness of the importance of schools and basics of disease safety, especially with regards to water-borne diseases such as cholera will also help to increase the morale of the Haitian people and build back economies and communities. And by enabling these Haitians, both children and adults, fear and violence that is borne of fear can be reduced. It is also possible to work through the Haitian government, by working through pre-existing connections from the UN mission and by lobbying various NGO’s. With those tools, we should pursue new laws to enforce earthquake resistant building codes, and set specific housing goals, something the Haitian government has still not yet done with the 1.5 million internally displaced peoples around Port-au-Prince. Again returning to the need to help the Haitian people reach a point where they can be a part of helping themselves, we can split the load between the foreign aid groups and the Haitian people. Through this mixture of aid projects designed to give the people the tools they need for long-term development and short-term survival, we can build back Haiti enough that the Haitian children will be able to take control over their own future. |