VOLUNTEER SUMMER SCHOOL IN BURYATIA 2009
Make change - educate yourself and others
Make change - educate yourself and others
VOLUNTEER SUMMER SCHOOL
BURYATIA 2009
BURYATIA 2009
CURRENT TEAM
What is the main target of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2009?
1) Ayuna Shoyzhitova : : Organizer of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2009.
2) Ayuna Shoyzhitova : : Organizer of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2009.
3) Ayuna Shoyzhitova : : Organizer of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2009.
4) Ayuna Shoyzhitova : : Organizer of the Volunteer Summer School in Buryatia 2009.
For all of you a higher education probably is something normal, evident and obvious. Everybody gets the higher education. But in the place where I would like to invite you to become a volunteer at the Summer School in Buryatia in July of 2009 children have never seen any foreigners, have never went abroad and some of them dont think that education is something necessary for them.
There is one school in Mikhaylovka village and 1 school in Yengorboy village. There study about 400 students in sum and many of them have no further prospectives of getting higher education because of few reasons:
1) corruption. The only town with 4 state universities is Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia. There live less than 1 mio people in Buryatia and about 373 000 people in Ulan-Ude. How many of them are responsible to make decisions who will study or who not? Not so many.
2) quality of education in the small villages at school is not very good and not on the same level as in the big cities. So the students from villages are less competitive and less successful at their entrance exams. Or: the children from totally buryat villages like Yengorboy have to pass all the exams in Russian not in Buryat. But Russian language IS a foreign language for them despite they speak it since their birth and despite they are Russians because they use it only at school not in their everyday communication. So they very often fail exams on writing essays in Russian, etc.
3) there is no job in these villages and the only money people can get usually is to exchange it for their cattle. So for many parents paying for their children' studies is too expensive and almost impossible.
4) young healthy full of energy people stuck in the villages where is no job because they have no opportunities to get higher education. Result: many 19-20 years old girls get pregnant by guys who refuse taking responsibility for the pregnancy. It means these girls would get stuck in these villages forever caring for their babies not getting higher education. And many guys ending up their life in prison or as alcoholics.
The consequences of all of that is a big amoung of suicides among young people. They have no future prospect and no value for their life.
Suicide becomes something common not scary, not frightening, not extraordinary. The suicide starts to seem for them to be the way of solving their problems.
The aim of the Volunteer summer school in Buryatia 2009 is on the one hand to promote higher education among local children, to show them that education is the way to make change in their lives and life of their homeland.
On the other hand I hope that coming as a volunteer to such a place will also broaden your mind.
And this is the main idea of the School - Make change - educate yourself and others.
