Racism. Slavery. Apartheid.
Sarah Sinizer-Hopkins was shocked by what she saw in the 1992 film “The Power of One,” which was shown to her seventh-grade class at Yavneh Day School in Los Gatos.
“I had understood it was going on in the world, I just didn’t know how harsh it was,” the 12-year-old Sinizer-Hopkins said about the film, which portrays the horrors of apartheid-era South Africa through the eyes of a white boy. “I really felt bad for the people who were getting whipped and were in slavery just because they have a different color.”
Yavneh Principal Joni Quintal was shocked, too, by the poverty she witnessed in visits to the Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain townships near Cape Town, South Africa. And she wanted to do something about it.
Quintal got her opportunity when her mother told her about an episode of “Oprah” she had just seen, in which the enthusiastic host talked about her new program, O Ambassadors, which pairs American schools with developing regions around the world and encourages students to raise money to help the region.
The O Ambassadors program is a joint project of Oprah’s Angel Network and Toronto-based nonprofit Free the Children, and is tied to the eight Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations in 2000.
The goals include reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
O Ambassadors focuses on the goals of eradicating poverty, achieving universal primary education, improving health and ensuring environmental sustainability. Each participating school chooses a developing region to learn about, and the program provides resources for educators and students about raising funds for and awareness of the region.
Quintal thought the program would be perfect for Yavneh.
“I love social awareness, social justice and tikkun olam — I’m passionate about it, and it’s one of the Jewish values we teach the kids,” she said. “We want to have kids see that it’s not just them in their little corner of the world. They can make a big impact.”
Quintal applied for the program in the fall and was notified in early November that Yavneh had been selected. About 1,000 school groups are currently active in the program.
The school was assigned a youth coordinator through Free the Children (in Toronto, Canada, where main international office is), and students signed up to join the O Ambassadors club, which is run as a middle-school elective class. The club was formed shortly before winter break with 13 students in sixth through eighth grades. Fourteen students are signed up for the next semester.
The club, dubbed Olam Ambassadors (“olam” is Hebrew for “world”), meets for an hour every Friday, with Quintal as its adviser.
Yavneh’s Olam Ambassadors are focusing on issues in West Africa, and will be paired with a community in the region in the fall.
The club will receive regular updates from Free the Children about construction and development in the community with which they were paired.
Yavneh’s Olam Ambassadors are just beginning to plan how they will raise money for their region. Ideas at this point include a bake sale and car wash, as well as asking local businesses and their families to match what the club raises. “We’re giving them the opportunity to decide what they want to do — this is student-driven,” Quintal said.
For starters, the students have been learning about what poverty means. Quintal brought in statistics about poverty in nearby San Jose, but found that the students considered poverty to be “an African or East Asian kid — someone other than themselves.”
She decided to show them videos she had taken in the South African townships to illustrate exactly what poverty looked like.
For Sinizer-Hopkins, a member of Olam Ambassadors, seeing footage of a basketball court with tire rims for hoops and a township home with dirt floors was all the motivation she needed to get serious about raising money for the club’s village.
“When I got home, I saw how nice my floors were in comparison,” she said. “It may not seem like much, but if we could get the word out that people in Africa are living many times worse than we are, then we could help start organizations to start earning money.”
Some students in the club have begun to take on their own projects to spread the word about the problems facing the West African region.
Seventh-grader Molly Ellenberg, 12, and her friend Sella Malin created a Web site, Raising Awareness (www.freewebs.com/raorganization that features stories the girls have heard about racial discrimination in the United States and abroad.
“I go to a Jewish summer camp, and just hearing about the Holocaust so much, I realized it was still going on in the world,” she said. “I thought [the Web site] would be one of the ways I could try and make a difference.”
So will Yavneh’s Olam Ambassadors get to meet the woman behind the “O”?
“We hope so!” Quintal said with a laugh. She plans to invite Oprah to visit the Olam Ambassadors closing event June 4 at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center, but admits it’s not likely she’ll show.
For now, students are content to speak to some far less famous people about their work. “Talking to little kids — I’m looking forward to that the most,” Sinizer-Hopkins said. “If we let the younger grades know about it, it might change their lives.”