By Ornella Attias, Year 10
As students living in Geneva, Switzerland, many of us can agree that we live in a privileged world where we have our basic needs like food, clothing, healthcare, and education covered. Having easy access to all of these things seems very natural and logical to us, to the point that we almost become unconscious of what many other peoples’ experiences are. The day-to-day things we take for granted are actually the things that less privileged people desire and dream about because they do not have access to them.
One of the things we take for granted daily is education. Going to school and having the ability to learn is a great privilege. But getting an education is often dependent on being able to read. In fact, not everyone is blessed with perfect vision, and having glasses becomes a necessity for such people to be able to read and therefore learn.
For my year 10 passion project, I decided to look into how I could help less privileged kids. I came across an article that gave some pretty scary statistics about how many underprivileged kids need glasses but cannot afford them. Ironically, many developed countries throw away millions of pairs of unused glasses per year. I took the initiative to help this cause by providing access to glasses through donations. I really thought this was a noble cause and something that my fellow students at LGB would be able to share the importance and meaning for us to give back.
It was such a great disappointment to see that not only my fellow students did not care and did not relate to this valuable cause, but they went further and decided it would be a comical act to try to destroy this initiative.
What we tried to do was to collect glasses by installing four cardboard bins around campus for people to donate their old/unused glasses. Within less than two hours of having installed these bins, some very “courageous “ but obviously anonymous individuals decided to destroy them. It seems that my collection bins were treated as trash cans as well as being crushed. Both my project partner and I were not only genuinely hurt but also disgusted and ashamed. This was not only a pitiful attack on a fellow student’s initiative but it was also an act of selfishness, lack of caring, lack of self-awareness of the kind of rosy cocoon life we live in…Perhaps these individuals were attempting an act of comedy? But did anyone find this funny?
I truly wished that the entire student body would have rallied behind this humanitarian effort. I was convinced that my fellow students would have jumped at the opportunity to help with the simple act of giving their unused glasses….It would seem to me that just listening to the news these days, all of us would understand that we need more caring right now in this world versus destructive selfish acts.
