Out of Bushwick

On July 31, 2008 CNN's Soledad O'Brien traveled with 30 Brooklyn schoolchildren on a volunteer mission to serve the impoverished and orphans in South Africa. These teenagers are mostly from Bushwick, Brooklyn -- a community of about 109,000 people located five miles from Manhattan. For most, it’s their first time away from home. The children on this trip to South Africa are what educators and social workers call "at-risk" -- at risk of having babies as teenagers; at risk of never finishing high school or achieving their dreams; at risk of never knowing the world beyond their neighborhood.

Bushwick is mostly a working class neighborhood where families have often struggled. For years it was a community with a thriving drug trade, severely under-achieving schools, extreme poverty and a staggering rate of teenage pregnancy. It was ravaged by fires and looting during the summer of 1977 and hit hard by the crack epidemic in the 1980s. The community is recovering now, but half of the children under age 18 still live below the poverty line. A quarter of the adults never make it past the ninth grade and more than half never graduate from high school.

The South Africa trip is Malaak Compton-Rock's brainchild -- to broaden the horizons of young teens and give them perspective on their own lives. These 30 children, between the ages of 12 to 16, have been paired up with college-aged mentors and brought to South Africa by Malaak Compton-Rock, the wife of comedian Chris Rock. She brought them to volunteer -- to serve the impoverished and the AIDS orphans South Africa, a country with the highest HIV-infected population in the world; a country with 1.4 million AIDS orphans. Compton-Rock has carved her own niche in community service. She often quotes her mentor Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund: "Service is the rent we pay for living."

I believe by traveling you open up your life and your mind. You no longer think locally, you start to think globally and internationally, outside the confinements of your neighborhood and it gives you a sense of confidence. In the United States, even in Bushwick, we have certain services that we need to understand and need to take advantage of. I am talking about things that we take for granted like access to free public education, food, knowledge and the ability to move up the ladder in life – things reserved for only the rich in most developing countries.

When the Bushwick travelers returned to the U.S. their journey did not end. Malaak Compton-Rock has required all of the children selected for the trip to sign one-year contracts to become "global ambassadors."
As ambassadors they are required to tell their friends and neighbors about their experiences -- through writing, blogging, photographs and speeches. What did they learn and discover about themselves, and the world? All the kids have been asked to blog about the joys and the challenges, the things they learned and the disappointments. The Bushwick teens came to make a difference in the lives of these vulnerable kids in South Africa. It will be equally interesting to see how South Africa's children make a difference in the lives of these children from Bushwick.

Cut and paste to get more information:

http://www.angelrockproject.com/arp/projects/journey_for_change.asp

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/06/01/btsc.bia.south.africa/index.html#cnnSTCPhoto